Kitten Clone: The History of the Future at Bell Labs

Apparently, based on the success of his meditation on “air travel and the human soul” as recorded in A Week at the Airport, author Alain de Botton put out the call for renowned writers to research and philosophise about other organisations that surround us but escape our daily notice. Being eminently suited for the task, Douglas Coupland spent a year investigating the work being done at Alcatel-Lucent – which pretty much built and now maintains the Internet – and to this end, Coupland visited four of their offices around the globe; describing the past (New Jersey), the present (Paris/Ottawa), and the future (Shanghai) of the company. Overall, this is a bit of a self-indulgent project (not least of all for the fantasised kitten-related subthreads) and the product that's made out of the journey – Kitten Clone – is a glossy, photograph-filled art book that dangles a few idea without looking at them too closely or offering any conclusions.

I was intrigued in the beginning when Coupland mentioned the “10 000 Hour Theory” (demonstrated so well by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers): that “neurons that fire together, wire together”, and as we early adopters of the internet have now been using it for 10 000+ hours, we have literally rewired our brains. And while Coupland wonders what that might mean for humanity, the answer isn't to be found in the corporate offices or research labs that he visits; it's just something to think about. (Although I did like his musings on how people who read novels expect their lives to have a plotline while those who spend their time surfing the net don't expect everything to add up to something larger; as someone who both reads and surfs daily, I wonder at my own brain's wiring.) 

While writing about the future of transportation, the following aside is something I also think about, and it is a fair example of Coupland's sense of humour throughout:

The one appalling thing about electric cars is that one plugs them into already overtaxed municipal power grids. Try mentioning this to a politician or manufacturer who wants to ride the green wave and you will quickly find yourself escorted out of the room. Mention this twice and you'll magically find yourself on the No Fly List. Mention this three times and your cold lifeless body will be found in a clump of brambles off the nearest motorway.

As a writer who is known for both capturing the zeitgeist and dabbling in futurism, Coupland repeatedly asks his interview subjects, “What's next?” And no one really knows – everyone at Alcatel-Lucent seems to be working on speed and broadband and marrying wireless to wi-fi, but the next big thing wasn't shared with us. It's interesting that everyone was surprised by how much bandwidth we all wanted – no one predicted that we'd be demanding to watch movies at the bus stop on our phones – and the real game changers (like apps and Facebook and Google) didn't come out of the big research facilities anyway: Alcatel-Lucent – though the inventors of the Internet and the Cloud, etc. – tend to think of themselves as the “plumbers” of the system now. Coupland assumes that the Internet will soon be seen as just another utility, and like those country folk who were forced to pay to hook up to municipal water when cities expanded to their fencelines, he sees a future of closed roads and backhoes and jacked up cable bills as we are all forced to retrofit our homes to a central fiber optic internet supply company. And in a “Generation X and Y” (for which he apologises in this book) manner, Coupland coins the following terms:

Omniscience Fatigue: Thanks to Google and Wikipedia, for the first time in the history of humanity, it's possible to find the answer to almost any question, and the net effect of this is that information became slightly boring.

That actually happens to me a lot: when I first got a smart phone, I was always like, “Who sang that song? Oh, let me Google it.” But now, even though trivia is just a few swipes away, it just all seems so...trivial. 

Blank-Collar Workers: The new post-class class. They are a future global monoclass of citizenry adrift in a classless sea. Neither middle-class nor working-class – and certainly not rich – blank-collar workers are self-aware of their status as simply one unit among seven billion other units. Blank-collar workers rely on a grab-bag of skills to pay the rent and see themselves as having seventeen different careers before they suffer death from neglect in a government-run senior care facility in the year 2042.

There isn't much more to Kitten Clone than that – it would have made an interesting magazine series, especially with the nice photos – and it doesn't take too long to read. At the end, there are ads for other titles in the series – looking at the IMF and life aboard a US Navy supercarrier – and I'd imagine they'd also be mildly interesting. This wasn't a waste of time, but for a look at a company I'd never heard of, I didn't learn very much; I could have spent that time surfing the net; especially as much of the real info Coupland shares with us is taken from Wikipedia and Alcatel-Lucent's own website.

Once again, I picked up a book because it's on a literary prize list, this time the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and although the winner will apparently be declared tonight, this is the first title I've found from the finalists, which are:

Eliott Behar for Tell It to the World: International Justice and the Secret Campaign to Hide Mass Murder in Kosovo
Douglas Coupland - Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent
Dean Jobb - Empire of Deception: From Chicago to Nova Scotia – The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated a Nation 
Lynette Loeppky - Cease: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Desire
Rosemary Sullivan - Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva