The Imperative of Asking “Why?"

A few days ago, I found myself at the dentist’s office discussing my son’s wisdom teeth. From the x-rays taken last summer, you could see them coming in strong and straight. The doctor asked me if I wanted to take them out. I asked, “Why?”

“Because that’s what we do.”

I have a lot of quirks, but one of them is the instant desire to do the opposite of anything suggested merely because it’s, “what we do.” The moment I hear those words, I probe further.

“Well,” I said. “Why do we do it?”

“Because there isn’t always room in the mouth for this set of teeth.”

“Does my son have enough room?”

“Yes.”

“Will they come in straight?”

“Yes.”

“Then why should we remove them?”

Pause. Smile. Finally, “Because they’re hard to clean. Keeping them healthy will require good dental care.”

“Don’t we need good dental care to keep all our teeth healthy?”

Still smiling, “Of course.”

I turned to my son and said, “It seems that if you want to keep your wisdom teeth, you’ll need to take care of them.” Which is exactly what’s called for to keep any of our teeth.

“Because that’s what we do.” There’s a lot of this in the world. So many systems, customs, conventions and procedures that we put up with simply because we don’t bother to ask why. Why do we have only two political parties? Why do we only allow marriage in pairs rather than trios or more? Why do we circumcise our sons? Why do we need to take a dozen standardized tests to get into college? Why are bombing Syria? Why is marijuana illegal? Why do we have single sex bathrooms?

Children always ask why and are often told to stop asking. To that I ask, why? Why do we tell our children to stop asking the only question that really matters in this world? Why is vital to learning. You can memorize something, but unless you ask why, you don’t own it. To ask why and then follow the path to the answer is learning at its purest. When my kids ask why, I often reply, “I wonder, I wonder.” Sometimes I give them an answer, other times I just let them wonder.

To ask why is to wonder about the world around you. Those who ask why are often seen as trouble makers, but really these are the change agents. If someone asks you why you do something, and you take the time to answer them, then discussion occurs. And it may very well be that at the end of the day both the questioner and the one being asked the question learn a lot.

Creatives are those who never stop asking why. Even though their parents and teachers might have tried to beat it out of them, they must ask the question often. This is what it means to be curious. Why often leads to how. How would it be to ride on the back of a particle of light? How would it be to live in a building one hundred stories high? How could we build it in a safe and sturdy manner? Then how can lead to what. What would it mean if we could communicate using radio signals? How can we transfer electricity throughout a city? Why do we use fuel that pollutes, and is difficult to mine without hazard, to heat our homes? How could we use the sun, or wind or water? Why do we still keep our account data in regions, like we did back when we were a telephony company, when now we’re a nationwide cable company running on an elegant, seamless fiber optic network? (That last question is for Comcast, who still doesn’t allow the Central Division to have access to customer data in the Western Division even though data by its nature essentially exists everywhere at all times.)

And now, as the Information Age completely threatens to overtake industry and bring us to the next evolution of living on this planet, it becomes even more important for all of us, creators and users alike to ask, WHY???? Because if we don’t, then we’ll find ourselves in a strange hybrid of a civilization where technology is stunted due to our fear and our society is a mess of industrial surfdoms.  And if we wait until then to ask why, we all know the answer will be…

“Because this is what we do.”

Which Side Are You On?

    

It’s a common thing to have to choose “sides.” In a world dead set on being binary, either/or, and exclusive, we all have to make decisions. Are you for the NSA spying on our personal internet experiences, or are you against? Is Edward Snowden a hero, or a monster traitor turned against his government? Do you think technology is good for us, or will it ruin our society, leaving nothing left in its trace?

Binary may be the language of the computer world, but human life isn’t binary. This is what differs our intelligence from artificial intelligence--we do not think or act in either/or. We romanticize that we are like machines, choosing logically in all conditions, but life isn’t black and white. We have colors such as gray, yellow, green, and brown, to name just a few. There are some behaviors that we can agree are entirely wrong, but most interactions in human life are complicated.

The internet may be a world of 1’s and 0’s, but human decision making is more quantum--one never knows where we’ll go or what we’ll do, given the circumstances at hand.

This week we learned from Snowden once more that the NSA is spying on us--this time within our gaming communities. World of Warcraft and Second Life have been infiltrated by the government. Phone records, banking statements and emails are personal, but what we reveal about ourselves when we play in these virtual realities is even more intimate. We form relationships online in these games. I once drove a thirteen year old boy home to his house who needed to arrive “on time” so he could gather with his friends from all over the world and fight a battle from the comfort of his bedroom. This is real to him, a place where he can be himself with others. Spying on gamers is a breech that borders breaking and entering.

As a result of these revelations, players from two major spheres of life came out this week to declare this state surveillance as unacceptable. First, Microsoft and Google formed a consortium with six other major tech firms to declare that laws be put in place to curb NSA actions. Then, the cultural community spoke out, with over 500 of the world’s leading authors doing the same.

Why is this important?

Of course each sphere has its own motivations. The tech giants fear orders on their services and products declining. Business wants the right to know everything we do so that they can make money off of us, but they don’t want the NSA surveillance to hurt their bottom line. As Falguni A. Sheth wrote in Salon.com this week, business and the government have, “...the quintessential neoliberal environment: Corporations and the government converge to strip the focus away from rights so as to have better control over individuals. But at the moment that corporate profit is threatened, corporations no longer act in complete concert with the state, but rather “institutions” (the government and corporations) battle each other for control over consumers/citizens.”

This is obviously not a black or white relationship.

Enter in the third player--those who’ve been most successful in the cultural sphere of life are joining in the discussion. The fight for data privacy isn’t about business vs. government. It’s about our stories, music, arts and cultural life remaining in our control. We already know that after the age of massive corporate mergers, only a few companies now control entertainment in our nation. The Internet is the only remaining free channel for information to flow between people, without being spun. Yes, you have to mine the chaff from the wheat, but these authors are correct when they claim that state surveillance takes away from the freedom of creation. It’s a trespassing on the cultural commons of our humanity.

How this plays out will determine the future. In my novel, eHuman Dawn, big business leads the Great Shift, convincing the world to Jump into the eHuman form, in order to make a ton of money. Government goes along for the ride because a networked population is easily controlled. A win-win for both entities. In eHuman Dawn, the cultural sphere is destroyed, manipulated and controlled--completely in the hands of those who own the technology. This would be a terrible loss to our humanity.

Therefore I find it a good omen that the most successful authors and business leaders are taking a stand against the government. If this alliance remains, we might be able to create solid protection laws that make moving towards a singularity society safer for humanity.