Tag: book

2019; Unified Korea

Can we change who we are? For millennia, we’ve eagerly bought potions and medicines that promised to make us smarter and wiser, and for just as long, we’ve been bitterly disappointed. Yet we kept coming back; there was just something irresistible about improving ourselves without any effort.

And then the promises came true.

Today, we might pity those who never had access to personality reconstruction and metacognitive mapping, but it’s easy to forget that mind-altering substances have always given a cruder kind of relief and variety to our lives.From alcohol and caffeine to cannabis and amphetamines, we’ve never lacked ways to stimulate and relax our minds.

It was much trickier, however, to create drugs that increase elements of our intelligence, like improved attention or wakefulness, without harmful side-effects. It wasn’t until the teens and 20s that we had the tools to produce the first true cognitive enhancers, or ‘smart drugs’. Completely unprecedented in history, they caused quite a stir.

I have a range of samples lined up here, provided generously by Prof. Arienne Niyonshuti at the Kigali Museum of Medicine. All of them are from the first wave of readily available consumer-grade smart drugs in 2019. On the left here, we’ve got an orange pill called Tricity, which improves memory formation and recall; next to it, there’s a square chocolate that helps with language; a green pill, Numony, that reduces tiredness and stress; and finally on the right I have a pill of the most well-known smart drug: Ceretin, a wide-spectrum cognitive enhancer.

So, let’s try one out! Here’s a glass of water… and I think I’ll take the Ceretin. Now, I’m told that we’re not supposed to take these drugs any more since they get automatically expunged by our neural laces, but I’ve had Prof. Niyonshuti’s team temporarily disable my lace’s usual functions aside from recording. Prof. Niyonshuti will now explain exactly what’s going on in my brain right now:

“We can see quite clearly that the active components of Ceretin are entering your bloodstream, crossing the blood-brain barrier, and altering the behaviour of your synaptic neurotransmitter receptors in the frontal cortex and cerebellum. It takes a few minutes for the drugs to take effect, though, so we’ll wait a little while before giving you the cognitive tests I’ve prepared.”

What’s extraordinary about these drugs is that their creators actually had very little idea about how they operated. Scientists could observe their effects and check for any harmful side-effects, and they had hypotheses about their method of action, but they would lack anything even approaching a complete model of the brain for at least another decade.

It looks like the Ceretin has now taken effect, so I’m going to take a few old-fashioned tests to assess my memory skills, along with reasoning and attention. I won’t bore you with the details, but they basically involve things like predicting the next symbol in a series, and distractor tests.

…And here are the results! Across the board, my cognitive performance has increased anywhere from fourteen to twenty percent compared to the tests I took beforehand. These results don’t prove anything in themselves, of course — I’m just one person, and this wasn’t a double-blinded experiment — but I definitely feel a fair bit sharper. I can only imagine how appealing it must have felt back then.

These weren’t the first smart drugs on the market — modafinil, an ‘alertness’ drug, was released in the 2000s — but they were the first to gain widespread popularity. The biggest markets for drugs like Ceretin tended to be countries such as China, Japan, Singapore, and Unified Korea, where they were heavily advertised on Starcraft and ZRG casts; North America and the EU lagged behind due to safety concerns.

Smart drugs helped students gain an edge when it came to the exams that controlled entry to meritocracies; they also eked out another percentage point of inaccurately-measured ‘productivity’ in large corporations. However, their high cost prompted violent protests by those who argued that they should either be made freely available or banned — with mandatory drug testing before exams. One Unified Korean chaebol, NSK, provided Mnemosyne for all of its thirty thousand employees.

Of course, it was impossible to stop smart drugs from being illegally imported and sold in other countries at inflated prices. This caused further tensions in highly unequal countries like the US, where they became another symbol of the power the rich had to simply ‘buy’ success. In 2024, President Martinez addressed the issue head-on by legalising not just smart drugs but also recreational drugs, and allowing for the production of cheap ‘generic’ smart drugs just five years after their initial release to market.

Smart drugs had their downsides. Though it was difficult to tell at the time, we now know that the benefits conferred by any given first or second-generation smart drug usually came at the expense of other cognitive functions like creativity, long-term memory formation, or empathy. The drugs also contributed to the damaging ‘speed-up’ culture of the time, increasing the pressure on already-frantic workers.

It’s time to turn my lace back on now, and that means the Ceretin will be flushed out within a few seconds. While it’s doing that, it’s fascinating to look back on how smart drugs, however crude they were, paved the way for our laces. Not long after the first wave, researchers were testing ways of combining them with portable transcranial magnetic stimulation, which offered superior temporal and spatial resolution to drugs, truly changing people’s mental capacities and even personalities. But it all started here, with these four pills…

Follow me at @adrianhon and @futureobjects

A History of the Future in 100 Objects will be available on Kindle, iPhone and iPad this summer as an eBook and iOS Newsstand app. A lovely coffee-table book will be out this autumn.

2015; Seattle, US

What is the good life? Philosophers, wise men, preachers, televangelists, self-help gurus — all have tried to answer the question of how we should live and thrive as humans. Some have been driven by a sense of moral duty and religious zeal, others by a quest for power and money, but over the millennia, they have never lacked a wide and willing audience, eager to better themselves and the world around them.

Unlike those who came before her, the guru who created one of the early 21st century’s most novel moral instructions wasn’t an eloquent writer or a charismatic performer. She was a programmer, and she made an application called The Guide to Greatness. Most knew it more simply as The Guide.

Sophia Moreno was the only child of Ernesto and Claudia Morena; Ernesto was a union representative at a chemical engineering plant in their home town of Santo Andre, while Claudia taught physics at UFABC. Sophia had a quiet childhood spent playing games and studying hard, and it wasn’t until she studied computer science in Rio de Janeiro that she stepped onto a path that would change the world.

On arriving in Rio, Sophia struggled with depression as she tried to fit in with her new surroundings and peers. She flirted with religion, falling in with an evangelical Christian student society for a few months; then just as quickly she left, burying herself in work. Over the next two years, she excelled at her studies, regularly scoring in the top 5% of her class and earning a placement at Amazon in Seattle.

But according to her friends, Sophia felt unfulfilled at her development job “shaving milliseconds off the shopping experience” and soon left to pursue her own projects. Her first independently made app was a comparison shopping utility and sold 5,000 copies. Her second app, an exam revision helper, sold a mere 700 copies.

Sophia’s third app was The Guide, launched in 2015 after a year of development. Within twelve days, it had sold 10,000 copies. In twelve weeks, it reached a million; in twelve months, 8 million; and after two years, 100 million copies.

“The Guide is about connections. Look around you. At the clothes on your body, the chair you’re sitting on, the walls beside you, and the phone in front of you. Everything we touch, eat, watch, and play is created by other people in this world.”

That’s the message that greets users when they first launch The Guide. It continues:

“Every one of us wants to become happy and successful and strong, but we can’t do that if we just focus on ourselves and ignore those whose lives touch us. Everything and everyone is connected, every second of every day. The Guide will show you how to see those connections, how to harness them, and how to help yourself and everyone around you to gain strength.”

Let’s face it — it’s not very original. But as a smartphone app that users kept right by their sides day and night, The Guide was in a unique position to directly interact and intervene in its followers’ lives. It helped them set and achieve goals, and it guided their behaviour in more subtle ways, from special greetings when they woke up, to inspirational messages before important meetings marked in their calendars. Naturally, being integrated with the burgeoning online social networks of the day, The Guide had a wide network of supporters from its very first day, so users could find like-minded souls instantly.

The Guide launched with 20,000 words of text divided up into 100 lessons, along with 25 interactive and replayable exercises, ranging from games to help users identify things in their surroundings that gave them joy, to emotion and thought journals. Naturally, The Guide took full advantage of the foolish ‘gamification’ craze of the teens, hooking unwitting users with the lure of experience points and levelling up. Sociologist and app historian Professor Colin Leigh explains its sensational success:

“The Guide directly addressed the lack of community and purpose felt by many in rich countries experiencing the ‘speed-up’. Traditional religious groups were too conservative to take full advantage of new technology, and the corporations and organisations that did have the expertise simply weren’t interested in more spiritual matters. Moreno’s background as a ‘generalist’ creator marked a genuine turning point.”

Not all of the millions who bought The Guide were active participants. Some bought it out of curiosity, others used it more as a positive-psychology productivity app. Even so, over a third used the app every day and took part in the Community Rituals that became so crucial to the app’s lasting success.

These rituals included everything from dinners and parties to exercise clubs, celebrations, and protests, and helped cement the bonds between followers in the real world. The fact that they were expected to actually turn up somewhere and meet with strangers in order to progress in The Guide set a surprisingly high bar, but it was later understood to be a real insight on Moreno’s part: she had correctly understood that the retreat of organised religion and comparable social structures had left a vacuum that people desperately wanted to fill.

For a while, it seemed as if The Guide itself was becoming a kind of religion. However, despite Moreno continuing to provide updates to the app over a span of three years, it became increasingly clear that she was deeply ambivalent about the success of The Guide. She made no public statements beyond what was in the Guide itself and left no records of her thoughts that we can find today, assiduously encrypting and then deleting them before her death. Most scholars speculate that the weight of responsibility she felt towards her followers was more than she wanted to bear.

Four years after its launch, Sophia Moreno sent out one final update. In it, she explained that she was delighted and proud of what her followers had accomplished, but now it was time for them to pursue their own ‘paths to strength’ independently.

The Guide’s user base fractured overnight. Some larger groups began developing their own open-source versions of the app, while competing apps made a landgrab for users, offering to transfer the achievements and experience points they had earned in The Guide to their own apps. As quickly as The Guide rose, it vanished.

Sophia Moreno retreated from public life, living off her revenues from The Guide and occasionally releasing artistic experiments. Yet her app, as short-lived as it was, proved there was a desire for a philosophy of life that complemented a market-based mindset with one rooted in communities and gifts. As for established religions, it was a startling reminder that their strength was not to be taken for granted.

Follow me at @adrianhon and @futureobjects

A History of the Future in 100 Objects will be available on Kindle, iPhone and iPad this summer as an eBook and iOS Newsstand app. A lovely coffee-table book will be out this autumn.

2014, San Jose, US

“Six months doesn’t sound so bad. I mean, compared to the guys I’ve met who were in for five years or fifteen years, I had it good. But it’s still plenty long enough to lose your job. Lose your family. Even lose your friends, people you thought you could rely on. Seemed like more than enough punishment for carrying some weed.”

In 2014, Ralph Turner, a 25-year-old truck driver and father of two, was arrested in San Jose on suspicion of possessing marijuana. Turner had been carrying over 30 grams, and after a short trial he was convicted and given a mandatory sentence of six months in prison.

California’s prisons were full to bursting, and with the state in the midst of a severe and extended budget crisis, it couldn’t afford to build any more. Faced with no alternatives, the court enrolled Ralph Turner into a pilot probation programme aimed at low risk offenders.

Turner was taken to an induction centre and shown a short video, and then his cell number was entered into a computer. A technician looped a measuring tape around Turner’s ankle and after a short wait, snapped a light plastic ring into place. He was free to go, and inadvertently became one of the first people to benefit from America’s slow turn away from its ruinously expensive and ineffective penal system.

The object I’m holding right now, an ‘ankle monitor’, is a thin ring of plastic, maybe half a centimeter thick if you count the inner padding. Inside the plastic is a simple computer, a radio, and a microphone array.

Like earlier monitors, it can locate the wearer by satellite positioning and send a warning if they’re leaving or approaching restricted areas. But Turner’s monitor is a little different: its microphone array constantly records and streams every nearby sound to a remote server, so if the wearer is suspected of violating their probation, the relevant audio section can be decrypted by court order. More controversially, in a concession to public fears, the monitor doesn’t just relay its position to the police and judicial system, it also informs a whole range of ‘concerned parties’ including schools, hospitals, and airports.

The theory was that this new generation of ankle monitors could be used for non-violent low risk offenders, such as those convicted of drugs possession or petty theft or vandalism. Not only would they save tens of thousands of dollars per person, they’d also allow the wearers to continue their jobs and live with their families. Coupled with mandatory community service, the monitors seemed to be the best — and only — alternative to a penal system that was too expensive and that barely appeared to reduce crime at all. Expert Amira Goss elaborates:

“Over ten million people worldwide were imprisoned in 2014, and a full quarter of them lived in America, a country with only 5% of the world’s population. Incredibly, most Americans gave little thought to their system of incarceration and if anything, many felt it was too lenient. The fact that prisons only became commonplace as a means of punishment in the 19th century was completely overlooked.

“From a historical perspective, America’s penal system was little different from the old ‘debtors’ prisons’, with many inmates made to work at below minimum wage to pay their way. Not only was it incredibly wasteful, but worse still, it didn’t really work. Recidivism rates were stubbornly high, and even long sentences didn’t seem to deter criminals who had few other options in life. My view is that they became more about retribution, and the very literal removal of criminals from sight — an understandable impulse for severe crimes like murder, but not for petty theft.”

In the years between 1970 and 2014, US incarceration rates increased five-fold thanks to mandatory sentencing laws, privatisation of the prison system, and much stricter attitudes to crime and punishment compared to other rich countries. The human cost of putting close to one in a hundred adults in jail was horrific, and certainly not worth the relatively modest decrease in crime rates, assuming that there was even any causal link.

Prison had become a place that destroyed families and jobs and bred a virulent criminal culture. As befitting the time, though, it wasn’t the human cost that eventually caused the change in direction which led to our ankle monitor; it was the economic cost. By the early 21st century, keeping someone in jail cost almost as much as the average US income.

The new ankle monitors were met with fierce resistance in California from all points along the political spectrum. The ACLU argued that the ankle tags violated human rights on a massive scale, while state Republicans claimed that ‘freeing’ tens of thousands of prisoners would cause a violent crime wave. As revealed by data miners taking advantage of transparency laws enacted in the 50s, much of the opposition was funded by donations from corporations profiting from private prisons, but at the time their warnings were met by a frightened and receptive public.

The government had little choice, though; it simply couldn’t afford the expense of housing so many prisoners. Thanks to a powerful speech from Reverend James Malone, a charismatic religious leader, the public was eventually convinced that it was better to try and reintegrate prisoners with society rather than lose a fortune on them.

The problems began almost immediately. Ankle monitors or not, many wearers weren’t dissuaded from committing crimes, even though they were swiftly apprehended. Hundreds more wearers simply vanished, and troublingly, several wearers were unfairly punished for simple malfunctions of their monitors.

As predicted by security experts, monitors were reverse-engineered in order to spoof and intercept the tracking signals. A firmware update eventually addressed these issues, but for a while, it was possible for anyone with the right equipment to track the wearers. Most damningly, the audio recordings were usually too poor in quality to be useful as evidence, at least until new hardware was released in 2018 and integrated with the wearers’ other sensors.

Yet the government forged on. Too much had been invested to give up now, and the promise of massive savings dazzled their judgement. Three years on, the pilot programme was expanded to all low-risk offenders and taken up by several other cash-strapped states convinced that it was an easy way to save money; in New York and Pennsylvania, the monitors were linked into a flexible community service system that allowed a much wider set of institutions — churches, charities, businesses — to work with offenders through automatic reporting and wireless tracking.

In the vanguard states, sentences became shorter, swifter, and surer. By 2036, the prison population in the US had been cut by a third, saving tens of billions a year — and more importantly, helping millions of offenders stay in work and keep their families intact.

What fascinates us today about ankle monitors is how they represent the dilemmas and compromises that were typical of the early 21st century. It would be a mistake to attribute the sweeping change in the US penal system to a mere piece of technology rather than its human backers and designers, but they still remain a powerful symbol. Social historian Julie Yao observes:

“The monitors were important because they helped to break a spiral of alienation and failure among prisoners. It’s easy for us to think that the Americans of 2014 were somehow heartless, but the truth is that most genuinely believed that prison was the only thing that stopped people from committing crimes, thanks to the sensationalist media.

“Monitors brought punishment and rehabilitation back into the open — but at the massive cost of normalising ubiquitous surveillance, a decision that we all know had serious consequences later in the century.”

We can’t know what Turner was thinking during his six months of monitored probation with his ankle monitor, but inspection of his nascent casters including Facebook, IMs, and text messages shows that he seemed to fare well enough. In an interview years later, Turner remarked, “I didn’t enjoy being a guinea pig one bit, and I sure as hell didn’t appreciate someone being able to listen in on everything that I did. But if you gave me the choice between prison and the monitor, you’re damn right I’d have strapped that thing on my ankle with my own two hands.”

Follow me at @adrianhon and @futureobjects

A History of the Future in 100 Objects will be available on Kindle, iPhone and iPad this summer as an eBook and iOS Newsstand app. A lovely coffee-table book will be out this autumn.