Invisible Ships
Posted on December 13, 2017
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel, ca. 1558
Middletown, Virginia is named not for what it is, but for what it is between. Population 1,100, the town boasts one hard-won stoplight, one policeman, a charming inn, and little else. It is my hometown. Fortunately, Middletown is two hours west of Washington, DC. Unfortunately, my parents (the progeny of farmers and potters) suffer from a congenital agoraphobia. The city, indeed most of the world, was a mystery, glimpsed mainly in segments on the evening news and in the pages of my father’s Ray Bradbury books.
There is one Bradbury piece that particularly haunted me: “The Highway.” The story tells of a husband and wife who live on an isolated farm along a major interstate. One day there is a worrisome lull in traffic, followed by bumper-to-bumper cars for hours. Finally one car stops and tells the farmers that a war is on: “The end of the world!” As the last car drives away, the husband takes up his plow and wonders, “What do they mean, ‘the world’?”
As with most Bradbury, it’s brazenly hokey. But what, really, does one mean by “the world”? What baffled the farmers?
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
— from Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, William Carlos Williams
In the 1550s, the Dutch Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel completed Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. It’s a perplexing thing. In the foreground a farmer plows his field. Below, on the coast, a shepherd tends his flock. A galleon is headed to sea, or perhaps to the city visible in the distance. You might scan the sky, seeking the titular Greek boy to no avail. Eventually, perhaps, your eye will catch something mysterious in the water near the ship. The painting is not large; you will have to lean close. And there, finally, you have found Icarus, or rather his upturned leg. The white forms above him, you now realize, are feathers from his wings. No one and no thing, not even the hawk perched nearby, seems to have noticed the splash.
The late Iain M. Banks’ magnum opus is a series of novels that chronicle life in the far-future quasi-utopian Culture. A post-scarcity starfaring society, the Culture includes humans, a number of alien races, and advanced artificial intelligences called Minds. At the beginning of Excession, one of Banks’ novels, some Minds are investigating an impossibility: a perfect black sphere suddenly appears at the edge of Culture space, emitting no radiation and ignoring all contact. The object is obviously artificial, and the Minds conclude it must be the work of a race with unfathomable capabilities.
Banks refers to the situation as an “Outside Context Problem”: the sort of problem “most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”
In the end, the OCP almost brings war as a splinter Culture group attacks the sphere. The ship flees just after announcing that it is an emissary from a transdimensional civilization. It has judged the Culture unprepared for contact.
In Life, the Universe and Everything, part of the classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, the protagonists find an alien spaceship parked in the middle of a city on earth. Obviously the ship should have caused mass panic. However in the novel the ship is hidden, not by any high technology, but behind a Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field. The author explains: an SEP is invisible because “[t]he brain just edits it out; it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly, you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is.”
There’s an apocryphal anecdote around the arrival of the conquistadors to the Americas. The native civilization, the story goes, had never conceived of seafaring vessels of any significant size. So the appearance of Spanish ships on the horizon, all sails and cannons, was obviously shocking. But the myth claims that the natives could not even see the ships. Supposedly, their inability to understand resulted in literal blindness: a Somebody Else’s Problem field in action.
Of course, this story is unverifiable and likely false, but it is somehow compelling. There are variations involving Columbus’ fleet, or ones where the white men themselves were rendered invisible, not just the ships.
The great irony in this story is that it’s the Spaniards who were truly blind. Colonialism is, if somewhat poetically, a blindness to the merits of another culture.
In Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Arjun Appadurai argues that the cultural economy is “complex, overlapping, disjunctive” and cannot be understood by pre-existing models. We must consider all facets of any interaction to comprehend its impact. I would argue that Appadurai doesn’t go far enough: below all his “scapes,” there is the “idioscape” (not to be confused with his “ideoscape”) — the uniquely personal, myopic, and stubborn worldviews held by each member of a society.
In the same vein, idioscapes must inform how we evaluate the impact of our designs. We have already problematized facile metrics of perceived “happiness.” But I would argue that even more enlightened forms of evaluation are potentially invalid unless they are co-designed with the audience.
We, as a race, are not on the same page, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Take climate change. There’s nothing to debate: we are screaming headlong toward a planetary transition and there’s little we can do to avert it. It is clear to me that more science and traditional forms of public education are not going to influence people. No billboard or television program or videogame or piece of legislation is going to magically fix the problem. And yet we flounder.
The most important design problem, the one that underlies any large-scale project, is this: How do we get people to change their behavior and act on a mass scale inside a global system without immediate feedback?
-TC
References
Adams, Douglas. Life, the Universe and Everything. Harmony Books, 1982.
Appadurai, Arjun. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Theory Culture Society, vol. 7, 1990.
Banks, Iain M. Excession. Spectra, 1998.
Bradbury, Ray. The Illustrated Man. Doubleday, 1951.