An excerpt from the novel "Endless Joke" about videophones and masks for photo and video - years before their real appearance
Once a thought came into my head that does not stand up to any logical criticism - “why the hell are the brightest minds of modernity crawl out of their skin for complete nonsense?”. Engineers with brains, which I can’t even dream of, with knowledge, from which the Babylonian library will burst - day and night fight to make my pages load half a second faster, the video was clearer, banners from the side guessed my desires, and my pictures on social networks looked like this like I'm not exactly a freak.
But I can not take it and refuse this "nonsense." On the day when my pages stop loading and the video is fuzzy, I will become the most annoyed and unhappy person. It does not leave the feeling that technology solves problems that they themselves create.
The best and most accurate illustration of this sensation I found in the novel “Endless Joke” by David Foster Wallace, for which our translators were afraid to take on more than 20 years. This week the translation is finally out. We publish the most ridiculous and creepy-prophetic passage about invisible madness due to our dependence on technology.
The passage parodies the IT article of Zhur, and tells how the future of America (where even the chronology is credited) started a videophony. People received a new technology, without which they had lived well before, and they were complexed from their image on the screen. Then the business came up with ideal masks for them, which, of course, did not get rid of the complexes, but turned them into a whole socio-psychological disorder.
It's funny to know that all this is written before the advent of Skype, smart cameras with AI and filters for photos on machine learning (even if Wallace, like most writers, did not foresee the rejection of analog media).
I asked one of the translators of the book, Alexey Polyarinov, what he thinks about this problem. Like Wallace, Alexey clearly noted where the main evil lurks.
In the ninth edition of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan comic, the main character travels on reservations. One of them is called “Farsight community”, it differs from the others in that nobody controls the technology in it. They are fundamentally against control. “Farsight” is a test techno-testing ground, any strange novelty is immediately put into action, everyone can turn themselves into cyborg, edit their DNA and increase their intelligence. It sounds good, but in fact, utopia looks pretty creepy - the death rate is much higher than in the outside world, and people have long lost their human appearance.
I like this release of Transmet. He very clearly shows that the main problem of any technology is man. We humans are pretty bad with a sense of proportion. And when creating new technologies, problems arise precisely in these territories - we are strange and unpredictable.
In the “Infinite Joke” fragment about the videophony, Wallace is talking about this and saying: a good, seemingly, idea was bent and reached the point of absurdity when the human factor came into force.
An excerpt from the "Infinite joke" about the death of videophony
Why — despite the fact that in the early years of the teleputers connected to the single InterLace network that worked on the same fiber-digital system as the telephone companies, the innovation of video calls (or “videophones”) was highly popular — users were delighted from the idea of communicating with both audio and video (the first generation of small videophone cameras were too primitive and narrow-aperture to suit anything other than close-ups of the face) on first-generation teleputers, which at the time I was practically ordinary TVs, although, of course, with this mandatory icon of the tiny “Artificial Intelligence” little man, who appeared in the lower right corner of the ether / cable program and reported the time and temperature outside, or reminded that it was time to take pills for pressure , or warned that on some channel there, such as the 491st, extremely interesting entertainment would soon begin, or, of course, reported on the incoming video call, and then tap dancing with symbolic boaters and a cane under the options menu - how did the users adore these icons of people, but yes, why for about 16 months, or five financial districts, the demand for videophony soared suddenly collapsed like a house of cards, so much so that by the Year of Absorbent Belie for Adults “Depend” any fiber-optic transmitters data or sop favoring products and services are used in less than 10% of all private telephone communications, and the average American user phone still prefer retrograde old low-tech voice call, in the era of Bella - changing preferences,
The answer, in three words, is:
- emotional stress
- experiences because of the appearance,
- some strange self-destructive logic of microeconomics of household high-tech.
1) It turned out that visual telephone conversations for some reason caused terrible stress, which was not observed in voice conversations. Users of the videophony suddenly seemed to realize that, with conventional voice telephony, they lived in a deceptive, but generally wonderful, illusion. Previously, they never even noticed it, the illusion — it was sort of so emotionally complex that it became possible to discern it only in the context of loss.
The good old traditional audio phones left room for assumptions that the person on the other end of the wire listens to you with undivided attention, while allowing not to pay any attention at all to it. Traditional acoustic communication - through a telephone receiver, in the earpiece of which there were only 6 small holes, but at the microphone (not without reason, as it turned out later) - 62, or 36 small holes - allows you to enter into some kind of motorway-hypnotic fugue of half-awareness: during a conversation you can look around the room, draw, smarten up, pick a burr, write hockey in the phone book, stir in pans on the stove; it is even possible to communicate separately with those present in the room in sign language and grimace while ostensibly listening carefully to the voice in the handset. And yet - and this, in retrospect, the most wonderful nuance is that although you yourself paid attention to the phone call and to all kinds of idle fug trifles, you were never depressed by the suspicion that the interlocutor on the other end of the wire just did not pay all attention only to you. For example, during a traditional call, while, say, you perform a close tactile examination of the skin of the chin for defects, you are never visited by the idea that the interviewee may also pay a considerable percentage of attention to the tactile examination of the skin on the chin for defects. It was an illusion, and an acoustic illusion, and it was acoustically supported: the voice from the other end of the wire was compact, squeezed and directed right into your ear, and left a place for delusion that the voice owner’s attention is similarly compressed and focused ... although attention - no, that's what's the matter. and with all sorts of idle fug trivia, you were never oppressed by the suspicion that the interlocutor on the other end of the wire just did not pay all the attention only to you. For example, during a traditional call, while, say, you perform a close tactile examination of the skin of the chin for defects, you are never visited by the idea that the interviewee may also pay a considerable percentage of attention to the tactile examination of the skin on the chin for defects. It was an illusion, and an acoustic illusion, and it was acoustically supported: the voice from the other end of the wire was compact, squeezed and directed right into your ear, and left a place for delusion that the voice owner’s attention is similarly compressed and focused ... although attention - no, that's what's the matter. and with all sorts of idle fug trivia, you were never oppressed by the suspicion that the interlocutor on the other end of the wire just did not pay all the attention only to you. For example, during a traditional call, while, say, you perform a close tactile examination of the skin of the chin for defects, you are never visited by the idea that the interviewee may also pay a considerable percentage of attention to the tactile examination of the skin on the chin for defects. It was an illusion, and an acoustic illusion, and it was acoustically supported: the voice from the other end of the wire was compact, squeezed and directed right into your ear, and left a place for delusion that the voice owner’s attention is similarly compressed and focused ... although attention - no, that's what's the matter. that the person on the other end of the wire just does not pay all attention only to you. For example, during a traditional call, while, say, you perform a close tactile examination of the skin of the chin for defects, you are never visited by the idea that the interviewee may also pay a considerable percentage of attention to the tactile examination of the skin on the chin for defects. It was an illusion, and an acoustic illusion, and it was acoustically supported: the voice from the other end of the wire was compact, squeezed and directed right into your ear, and left a place for delusion that the voice owner’s attention is similarly compressed and focused ... although attention - no, that's what's the matter. that the person on the other end of the wire just does not pay all attention only to you. For example, during a traditional call, while, say, you perform a close tactile examination of the skin of the chin for defects, you are never visited by the idea that the interviewee may also pay a considerable percentage of attention to the tactile examination of the skin on the chin for defects. It was an illusion, and an acoustic illusion, and it was acoustically supported: the voice from the other end of the wire was compact, squeezed and directed right into your ear, and left a place for delusion that the voice owner’s attention is similarly compressed and focused ... although attention - no, that's what's the matter. you perform a close tactile examination of the skin of the chin for defects, you are never visited by the idea that the interlocutor may also pay a considerable percentage of attention to a tactile examination of the skin on the chin for defects. It was an illusion, and an acoustic illusion, and it was acoustically supported: the voice from the other end of the wire was compact, squeezed and directed right into your ear, and left a place for delusion that the voice owner’s attention is similarly compressed and focused ... although attention - no, that's what's the matter. you perform a close tactile examination of the skin of the chin for defects, you are never visited by the idea that the interlocutor may also pay a considerable percentage of attention to a tactile examination of the skin on the chin for defects. It was an illusion, and an acoustic illusion, and it was acoustically supported: the voice from the other end of the wire was compact, squeezed and directed right into your ear, and left a place for delusion that the voice owner’s attention is similarly compressed and focused ... although attention - no, that's what's the matter.
From an emotional point of view, this two-sided illusion of one-sided attention caused almost childish joy: the person believed that he had taken control of someone's undivided attention without having to respond to it in return. If you look at the past objectively, the illusion seems aratial, almost literally fantastic: it’s like lying and trusting others at the same time.
Video telephony ruined a similar fantasy. Now the callers have found that they have to portray the same sincere, slightly artificial expression of attention to the listener, as in personal communication. Those subscribers who succumbed to the fuzzy habit of drawing or smoothing wrinkles on their pants, now looked impolite, absent-minded or childishly fixated on themselves. Subscribers who, in even greater unconsciousness, examined the skin on their chin for defects or examined the nasal cavities, saw horror on the video faces on the other end of the wire. All this led to videophone stress.
Even worse, of course, the injury was akin to exile from paradise, when you delineate your thumb on the page in the diary or put your hand in your pants, correcting the position of your good old Block, and then you look up and see how your videophony interlocutor with interest picks out the lace from , and suddenly you realize that the whole infantile fantasy, as if you own the attention of a partner, while you yourself are drawing and correcting the positions of the genitals in a state of a fugue, was an unfounded illusion, and that you own someone else’s attention no more than It is its handle. In general, all these problems with attention - continuous stress, users decided.
2)And the videophone stress was even stronger if it was about at least some vain people. Those. about those who care about how they look. In the eyes of others. But seriously, who doesn't care? Good old acoustic phone calls could be made without any makeup, wig, surgical prostheses, etc. Yes, even without any clothes, if you already have such cockroaches. But those who care about appearance, of course, could have forgotten about the informal “answer-in-what-is” in the case of visual video calls, which began to seem to subscribers like not the good old phone call, but the doorbell when before you open it, you have to throw something on yourself, fasten dentures and smooth the hair in front of a mirror in the hallway.
But the last nail in the coffin of the videophony was what the callers looked like on the TP-screen during the calls. Not the persons calling them, but their own, it was worth seeing them on video. In the end, turn on the TP video recording function, record both signals in a two-way video call, play the call again and see how your face actually looked in the eyes of the interlocutor - it’s a matter of three buttons. And to keep from such a check is as difficult as to look into a random mirror. But the result was almost universally terrifying. People were horrified at how their faces look on the TP-screen. And it's not just the “obesity announcer” - the well-known effect of excess weight on the person on the video. No, worse. Even in the advanced high-definition TP screens, subscribers saw their phone faces as blurry and wet, they saw some brilliantly pale uncertainty, which seemed to them not just unsightly, but also thieving, insidious, unreliable, unpleasant. In an early and ominous InterLace / GTE focus group survey, the results of which in a fit of entrepreneurial NF-technical agiotage all closed their eyes, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophone calls, especially often to describe their appearances used the words “unreliable”, “unpleasant” or “an amateur”, and the phenomenally sinister 71% of senior citizens specifically compared their video faces to Richard Nixon’s face during the Nixon and Kennedy debates in 1960 BC. with. on the results of which, in a fit of entrepreneurial NF-technical agiotage, everyone closed their eyes, almost 60% of respondents who had visual access to their own faces during videophone calls, especially often used the words “unreliable”, “unpleasant” or “not amateur” to describe their appearance , and the phenomenally sinister 71% of senior citizens specifically compared their videolitsu with the face of Richard Nixon during the Nixon and Kennedy debates in 1960 BC. with. on the results of which, in a fit of entrepreneurial NF-technical agiotage, everyone closed their eyes, almost 60% of respondents who had visual access to their own faces during videophone calls, especially often used the words “unreliable”, “unpleasant” or “not amateur” to describe their appearance , and the phenomenally sinister 71% of senior citizens specifically compared their videolitsu with the face of Richard Nixon during the Nixon and Kennedy debates in 1960 BC. with. and the phenomenally sinister 71% of senior citizens specifically compared their video faces to Richard Nixon’s face during the Nixon and Kennedy debates in 1960 BC. with. and the phenomenally sinister 71% of senior citizens specifically compared their video faces to Richard Nixon’s face during the Nixon and Kennedy debates in 1960 BC. with.
A solution to the problem that the psychological consultants of the telecommunications industry have called videophysiognomic dysphoria (or VFD) has become, of course, the flourishing of High-Resolution Masks; and, interestingly, it was precisely those businessmen who were indulging in videophonic image processing in HD, and then frankly switched to masks, came out of the short-term videophonic era with shirts, and in addition, with substantial additional profits.
If we talk about masks, the original option of Photographic Image Processing in HD - i.e. take the most flattering elements from a variety of flattering photos of this telephone subscriber from different angles and - thanks to the imaging programs of those times already tested by pioneers from the cosmetic and law enforcement areas - to combine them into an extremely attractive real-world facial collage with sincere, a little with a mock expression of undivided attention, - the option, which is less expensive and saving bytes, quickly replaced (based on all the same cosmetic and fbrovskiy software) tlivat improved facial image on polybutylene-fitting mask, and soon consumers found that the high cost of a permanent mask to wear thanks to the miraculous effect on stress and WFM more than paid off, Well, comfortable velcro in order to fix the mask on the back of the head were worth a penny; and a couple of fiscal quarters, telephone / cable companies strengthened customer self-confidence undermined by VFD by agreeing to a deal in a horizontal integration format, thanks to which free collage services and masks came in one package with a videophone. HD masks usually hung on a small hook on the side of a TP phone console, admittedly, with some kind of surreal and unnerving look: separated from the body, empty and wrinkled - and in places of collective access, that is, in large families or companies, and potentially embarrassing embarrassments due to the confusion of personalities in the hasty selection of the wrong hanging mask from a long row - in general, the masks at first seemed to be a viable industry response to the appearance problem,
(2 and probably 3 more)But now add up the natural entrepreneurial instinct to fully satisfy the inflated customer requirements on the one hand with almost the natural distortion with which people usually see themselves, and then the rate of full exit from the control of the HD HD masks boom will be explained. It is not only that it is unusually difficult to independently evaluate how you look, good or not so hot - for example, look in the mirror and try to determine where you are in the hierarchy of attractiveness, at least approximately with the same objective ease with which you distribute all the others, they look good or not so hot - but in addition, it turned out that instinctively distorted consumer self-perception plus the stress associated with the appearance led to what consumers began to prefer, and then openly demand Deof masks, which really looked much better than they did in person. Manufacturers of HD-masks, who are happy to provide not only credibility, but also aesthetic improvements - willed chins, smaller bags under the eyes, smeared scars and wrinkles - were soon beaten out of the niche of the market of manufacturers of original mimetic masks. In an increasingly frank progression in just a couple of financial districts, most consumers now used masks with a videophone, so aesthetically superior to their real faces in physical conversation, broadcast to each other such horrendously distorted and improved images of themselves that the giant psycho-social stress and a huge number of subscribers suddenly began to show in general, they stopped to leave home and communicate personally with people, because those, as they were afraid,
The social fears accompanying the phenomenon, named by psychoconsultants with optimistic non-representative disguise (or ONM), have truly progressed against the background of how tiny rough first-generation videophone cameras improved and got aperture wider, and now tiny advanced cameras could reflect and broadcast more or less images full height. Some psychologically unscrupulous entrepreneurs brought to the market growth polybutylene and polyurethane 2D tantamaresks - something like headless "strong man" or "beauty in the soul" for cheap photos on the beach, behind which you stand up and put your chin on a cardboard stand, only these growth videophone masks were much more advanced and reliable. And it was worth adding various 2D wardrobes, options for eyes and hair, various aesthetic additives, cuts, etc., how prices have come up against the ceiling of market opportunities, although it was then that social pressure forced us to buy the best possible 2D growth images in order not to feel relatively ugly on the phone. At this point, anybody will say how little time passes before the indefatigable entrepreneurial drive to an ideal mousetrap is embodied in the form of the Broadcast Screensaver (or TK), which, in retrospect, seems to be a really sharp end of the nail in the coffin of videophony. With TK in facial and growth masks, it was no longer necessary - they were replaced by a video-translated image, in fact, a retouched photo, with an incredibly fit, attractive, tastefully dressed person who resembled the caller only in such limited relationships as, for example, race or number of limbs ,
The screensavers were simply ready-to-broadcast photos with high resolution of about diaram proportions, located on a plastic bracket above the pupil of a videophone camera, approximately like a lens cap. Extremely beautiful, but not terribly successful celebrities from the online media - those who in past years would add to social advertising casters - whether we are in the field of modeling for various advanced Videophone Screensavers.
Since the Screensavers were a regular and always ready-to-broadcast photo instead of computer processing and improvements, they could be massively produced and priced at a reasonable price, and, although not for long, the Screensavers helped to reduce the tension between the high cost of the improved growth mask and subscriber’s to mention the creation of a variety of jobs for interior designers, photographers, retouchers and celebrities at the level of social networks, frightened by the decline of on-air television advertising.
3)But from the graph of more than the short-term viability of innovation in domestic technologies, you can learn some lesson. The path of videophony fits perfectly into the classic ring shape of this graphic: first, in everyday technologies, a magnificent, sci-fi innovation arises - such as the transition of calls from audio to video - which always, unfortunately, leads to unforeseen drawbacks for the consumer; and but then the niches of the market created by these shortcomings - like the stressful rejection of people experiencing because of their appearance, because of their own videophone image - are ingeniously filled by businessmen with a lively imagination; and yet it is precisely the advantages of these ingenious compensations of disadvantages that seem too often to undermine the original high-tech innovation, which leads to an outflow of consumers, the closure of the schedule and the massive loss of shirts rash investors. In this case, the evolution of compensation of stress and problems with the appearance caused first the failure of video callers from their own faces, then from disguised and improved to the limit of physical similarities, and as a result, the closure of cameras and the transfer from one TP to another attractively stylized static Screen Savers. And behind these diorama lens caps and screensavers broadcast, subscribers, of course, found that they were again invisible without any stress, seamlessly made up without wigs and with bags under their eyes, behind their dioramas with celebrities like a stone wall, and free again - because. invisible again - to draw, look around for skin defects, do a manicure, smooth out pants - while attractive,
And, of course, all these advantages are nothing but the once lost and re-acquired advantages of the good old blind acoustic telephony of the Bell era, with its 6 and 62 holes. The only difference was that the stupid, unreal stylized Screen Saver, which flies into a pretty penny, was transmitted along expensive fiber-optic lines between the TPs. After this awareness has leaked into the minds of consumers and spread everywhere (the most interesting thing is mostly through the phone), then any microenometerist would say how little time will pass to the inevitable oblivion of an advanced visual videophony, after which the return to good old telephony was not followed. only on the orders of common consumer sense, but even cultural approval in the form of some fashionable principles: not Luddism, and a kind of retrograde victory over the NF-hi-tech for the purity of the soul, a victory over slavery before the appearance and before the fashion for hi-tech - slavery, which people find in each other so unattractive. In other words, the return to acoustic telephony became at the end of the closed curve of the graph a certain status symbol of anti-vanity, so only subscribers with a lack of self-awareness continued to use videophony and Screen Savers, not to mention masks, and these tasteless facsimile lovers became ironic symbols of tasteless vain slavery before PR corporations and cutting-edge innovations - for the era of sponsorship, the tasteless equivalents of people in bright costumes, with pictures on black velvet, sweaters for poods her electric zirconia bracelet, LingvaSkrebkami "NouKout" and so on. Most of the subscribers of communications threw Screensavers-dioramas on the mezzanine and closed the cameras with standard black caps for the lens, and on the hangers for masks on the telephone consoles they hung new trendy address and telephone notebooks with special rings on the bindings for convenient hanging on the former hangers for masks. But even then, of course, the mass of American consumers reluctantly left the house and the teleputer to communicate in person - however, the persistence of this phenomenon cannot be attributed to the videophone bziku per se, and still this panarafobiya revealed to the entrepreneurs huge new teleputer markets for home shopping and delivery, so much the industry is not bothered. and on hangers for masks on telephone consoles they hung new trendy address and telephone notebooks with special rings on bindings for convenient hanging on former hangers for masks. But even then, of course, the mass of American consumers reluctantly left the house and the teleputer to communicate in person - however, the persistence of this phenomenon cannot be attributed to the videophone bziku per se, and still this panarafobiya revealed to the entrepreneurs huge new teleputer markets for home shopping and delivery, so much the industry is not bothered. and on hangers for masks on telephone consoles they hung new trendy address and telephone notebooks with special rings on bindings for convenient hanging on former hangers for masks. But even then, of course, the mass of American consumers reluctantly left the house and the teleputer to communicate in person - however, the persistence of this phenomenon cannot be attributed to the videophone bziku per se, and still this panarafobiya revealed to the entrepreneurs huge new teleputer markets for home shopping and delivery, so much the industry is not bothered.