Dr. Dobb's Journal January 2000
I hadn't been to Foo Bar in months. It hadn't changed much, although there were some fresh faces in evidence. Foo Bar is the late-night hangout where I work off and on as relief bartender, chiefly because the computer-industry gossip is so good there. Not so much for the tips as for the tips, as I like to say. Among the fresh faces this night were a gaggle of 20-somethings at one end of the bar, including one young woman in a T-shirt bearing the slogan "Be a blip."
I puzzled over its possible meaning as I served drinks to that night's selection of CEOs, journalists, inventors, and oddballs (categories not necessary exclusive) who frequent the place.
In the booth in the back, half-hidden by the runaway Ficus plant, sat The Man in Black.
He was dressed in black from head to toe, wore heavy-framed dark glasses, and had a watch on each wrist. He was chubby and hamster-cheeked and his clothes seemed lumpy. He looked like a rock star. He looked like Roy Orbison.
He ordered a margarita, and when I delivered it, I noted that the lumps in his clothes were all pockets crammed with electronic devices.
"We usually ask folks to check their cell phones at the door, pardner," I kidded him.
"These are all mockups and prototypes," he explained. "I'm doing wearability testing for some new designs."
"New designs of wearable devices?"
"No, designs," he repeated, as though speaking to a child. "I'm a fashion designer for Duds Dot Com, and I'm working up a whole line of clothing for the cyborg generation." He gave me an even more condescending look over the top of his glasses, which I now saw had windows in the corners of the lenses to serve as a display for the computer in his thigh pocket, and explained further: "The coming thing is to be so wired up that one is virtually a cyborg, continually connected. I'm designing the clothing to make it all possible."
I left him with his margarita and his cyborg dreams and deposited the requested Canadian beer in front of the one person in the place who most looked like a cyborg. He was wearing a lot of equipment, none of which fit in his pockets, and he kept gesturing oddly at other patrons while muttering into his shirtfront. With the obscure bit of gear strapped to the back of his hand, the gestures looked vaguely threatening. I had mixed feelings about this character. On the one hand, he was acting pretty odd. On the other hand, how dangerous could somebody be who ordered Canadian beer? Just to be on the safe side, I decided to chat him up.
"Why, I'm Gordon Nanosecond," he said, shocked that I didn't recognize him. The name actually rang a muffled sort of bell.
"Something to do with folk singing, folklore, something folksy anyway, right?"
"Cyberfolkulturecording," he said, making it all one word. It turned out that the thing on the back of his hand was a directional microphone and he was recording words or parts of words from ambient conversations, mixing them into some artful composition with the aid of custom software in the computer strapped to the small of his back, and continuously feeding the result to the Web via a cellular link. It was a folk artform he had invented, he said.
A little later I was serving a Cuba Libre for journalist Flip Nudge at the bar and telling him about Gordon Nanosecond's new folk artform, which I said sounded like an oxymoron.
"I like it," Flip said. "He's giving everyone their timeslice of anonymous fame."
"Isn't anonymous fame an oxymoron?"
"Not any more. Andy Warhol talked about 15 minutes of fame? Now it's milliseconds. We can all be famous, but for so short a time that we're not noticed. It's sort of paradoxical, when you think about it. What do I have to do to get a refill, anyway?"
As I was mixing him another, a patron fixed me with a penetrating gaze and asked, "Aren't you Mike Swaine?"
"Mike left a few minutes ago," I lied. Maybe he believed me. I just didn't want to be a blip that night.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com