Waiting for an Ambulance and a Tow by Jim Culleny I was cruising the information superhighway under a cyber sun, top down, warm zeros and ones breezing through my hair, digging my soundblaster; but after unexpectedly driving into a particularly dismal screen, I pulled over in a funk, parked my mouse and wondered, Superhighway to where? Trying to square our high-tech good-life with our primal urges is a soul-bending challenge. Its not easy to be of two minds. We see the effects of this daily in the news. With mayhem in the wind, a better question to ask than, How fast can I download graphics? would be, Where are we going and what are we ignoring to get there? I admit it, I’m as much a slave to technology as the next guy. But I think, if you head off on a journey, then probable destination is an idea worth considering. After all, the use of any highway, asphalt or information, can lead to various outcomes; some happy, some sad. We could pull up safetly at grandmas to the smell of freshly baked apple pie, or commit a fatal error and die in a hard drive crash. You never know for sure. At the turn of the millenium the defining events in life are still more a matter of luck and-free will then of technology. The tobacco companies, for example, during their long, lucerative corporate lives, had plenty of evidence years ago showing that their product was killing some of their most loyal customers. They probably stored this information in computers. But, having a perpetual pool of greenhorns willing to sacrifice virgin lungs, the industry, with an eyeball on the bottom line, just sat on it. Lack of information wasn’t the problem. I can still see them at those nicotine hearings in ‘98, a phalanx of executives in suits on national TV in the very act of despoiling their integrity. They all swore smoking had nothing to do with cancer. Pillars of their communities. In suits. And wearing neckties and wingtips! It just goes to show you can’t tell a crook by his cover and, also, if we’ve got problems, information retrieval alone isn’t going to solve them. We can gather info from now until they make zip drives bigger than Jesse Helms’ capacity for small thoughts, but if we don’t transform this information into at least water, air, and food for all, we may as well be downloading data with Bics onto post-it notes in gale-force winds. That’s a lot of energy to waste to come up grasping little worth having. Every generation sees itself on the cutting edge, but caught in our techno-frenzy, we forget that information-related frauds are as old as the concept us-and-them. During the dark Ages, elites such as priests and scribes, made careers in collecting, hoarding, and managing information, --the AOL-Time-Warners of their time, though without satellite hookups. But, as Bob Dylan said, “Propaganda all is phoney no matter how wide the bandwidth available,”... or something like that. We should know by now, you can’t outrun mendacity by boosting megahertz. If, instead of audio tapes, Richard Nixon had had a million megahertz processor at his disposal and a gazillion gigabyte hard drive, my guess is he still would have been waving bye-bye prematurely from the White House lawn. We can only hope. For all its virtual promise I don’t see the information superhighway taking us anywhere important we haven’t been before. Information and wisdom should never be confused. What I do envision is all this lightning data streaming along our info interstates with tens-of-billions of bits ramping off each second onto every main and side street from Connecticut to Calcutta. But where does it all wind up? Where it always does, squeezed into the often narrowest bottle-neck of them all, the human heart and mind. What we’re faced with now, as a species, is that our impulse to self-destruct may be threatening our will to survive. Despite the cute tricks of all our cyber-imaginators, this is a situation that’ll never be remedied by hard drives, zip drives, sound or smart cards, pumping up the gigabytes or downloading from websites; the internet ot ethernet, iMacs or iBooks, ebay, email, etrade; or the whole www.dot for that matter. With all this fabulous e-life we’ve been living we forget, there is space other than cyberspace --the space in which the six-billion or so of us actually live. The one with wormholes and warts. In fact, most of us do not troll the Information Superhighway hooking hypertext, but can be found instead, just off any local byway or beltway sweating up next month’s rent without benefit of a CPU. You have to wonder. With our penchant for burying our heads in Pentium chips while riding wall street graph lines through the hole in the ozone as the globe warms and rain forests burn --well, we’re all likely to end the 21st century in a heap alongside the Information Superhighway waiting for an ambulance and a tow. ...