Uncategorized – Page 20 – Pathetic Fallacy

Highway 17

Now that I have a new computer I have about three or four months to enjoy being technologically current before sliding inexorably back into obsolescence. For me (to my wife’s sadness) this means playing all the games my old computer couldn’t handle; this is approximately all of them.

One evening about a week ago I was playing Half-Life 2 when I noticed I was feeling feverish and sweating; however, it’s summer in Boston and my basement can get kind of stuffy, so I turned on a fan and went back to whacking headcrabs with a crowbar. All at once I felt like throwing up, which I almost never do. I thought I had come down with something and I staggered to bed.

Feeling better the next day, I resumed the game and promptly needed a lie down, fast. So it had really happened: I’d become motion sick from a video game. The nausea wasn’t half as bad as feeling like a wuss; I had really become an old guy for whom freaking Half-Life was too heavy a dish. I waited for the floor to stop spinning and then picked myself off it. Then I typed “Motion sickness Half Life 2” into the search bar.

Turns out, this is a common problem with Half-Life 2, with discussions on dozens of message boards. Amongst all the jibes of n00b and fucking pussy go back to Tetris I learned that the likely cause of my reaction was the field of vision the game depicts. While most first-person games use a 90 degree angle of view (which roughly corresponds to real life), Half-Life 2 is set to 75 degrees, a sort of tunnel effect, like looking through a pair of binoculars (which can also make me a little dizzy). Fortunately, the game allows you to adjust the field of vision and I did. And that was it. The relief was immediate and complete, and I was able to continue through the game’s roughest, shakiest camera bits with no ill effects at all.

But while I’ve enjoyed the game and also like not being sick, the whole experience has been unsettling. My mind had been tricked by a tiny wedge of virtual sight into debilitating illness. Not only that, but the solution was mundane, mechanical, predictable. At some level I know that what I call myself is a series of biological and psychological processes, but the full implications of that are not something I dwell on. I don’t believe in an animating soul that is the truest self, but I do like to think that the mind is more than a chemical/electrical call and response. But those 15 degrees seem to say otherwise.

What we talk about when we talk about patents III

Granting patents is society’s way of saying that certain devices or processes are original; implicit in the system is the idea that novelty is to be especially rewarded. It’s an inherently individualistic, anti-cooperative approach to innovation. It’s also one based on the romance of competition as the basic mechanism of progress. Americans have great faith in the adversarial: our government, our legal system, our economy are all based on the idea that the clash of interests will result in great laws, or justice, or prosperity. But the ugly truth is that competition doesn’t only produce better things, it produces better ways of eliminating your competition.

And to be honest, there aren’t a lot of lightbulbs waiting to be patented. No one is going to find a seventh simple machine. Invention isn’t so much a process of aha! as it is of hmm. It’s about looking into the current state of technology and finding a good place to continue. This is particularly true when it comes to software development, and it’s interesting that developers themselves have been vocal opponents to the idea of software patents. But holders of patents are, by and large, not inventors but corporations, and for them the main attraction of patents is to build up an arsenal of potential lawsuits or to protect themselves from said lawsuits.

Back in the 1970’s there was a Parker Brothers game call The Inventors in which players would purchase zany old-timey inventions, patent them, and then seek royalties. Amusingly, the inventions themselves were all of questionable value and completely interchangeable from a gameplay stance. One concern was that until “patented” the inventions could be stolen by other players. So the lesson was not that patents help to bring useful ideas to the market so much as they are chips in a legal game. While I don’t think satire was the goal of the game designers, they got this all pretty much on the nose.

What we talk about when we talk about patents II

America loves the single guy against the world. There’s one story that colors our ideas about invention and innovation more than any other, and that’s the story of Thomas Edison. The tale of a telegraph operator picking himself up through ingenuity to secure more than 1,000 patents and usher in the electrical age is charming and magical, to the point that the light bulb itself has the symbol of sudden insight. Of course the problem with this story is it’s mostly crap.

Not that Edison wasn’t a genius, because he was; not because he didn’t oversee remarkable innovations, because that’s true as well. But the majority of his work, including the development of a commercially viable incandescent bulb, was simply incremental improvements on other people’s ideas, carried out by an army of work-for-hire inventors who were treated with varying degrees of fairness. Edison is famous for his poor treatment of Nicolai Tesla, and then subsequently fighting a wrong-headed battle with his former employee over whether electrical distribution should use AC or DC current. But Edison had an even darker side, a ruthless side. He vigorously protected the copyrights to his motion pictures even as he duplicated and exhibited Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon without compensation.

Edison was a complex man with a mixed legacy. But my point here is he was not solely, or even primarily, responsible for the various patents he acquired. Nonetheless, his legend lives on in the way we think about patents: the solitary inventor with original insight needs protection from the “theft” of the fruits of his genius. He is rewarded with riches, we are rewarded with innovation. It’s a pretty story, and it would be harmless enough, except that it’s riddled with false assumptions about the nature of innovation and the importance of originality. It’s this last myth—that purely original ideas are to be valued above incremental improvements, that purely original ideas exist at all—that has done the most damage to the way that patents are awarded and rewarded.

(to be continued)