The Omnipresent Swarm: Smartphones

In 1999, Yale Professor of Computer Science and unabomber victim David Gelernter published “the Second Coming - A Manifesto” in which he declares how he thinks computing is transforming. Twenty years later, it’s worth revisiting some of Gelernter’s predictions to see if they’ve come into being or have yet to be created. 

Gelernter says people never cared about the hardware that is a desktop computer - all people want is access to information. Thus, he claims, “in the future, people are connected to cyberbodies; cyberbodies drift in the computational cosmos — also known as the Swarm, the Cyberspher.” In the swarm there will be so many computers that they will blend together seamlessly “as anonymous as molecules of air.” Is this the case today? How close are smartphones to Gelernter’s description of cyberbodies?

Smartphones are everywhere, and while they don’t completely match Gelertner’s descriptions of tuners and calling cards, they have the ability to contain our entire electronic lives. Are smartphones so seamless that they feel as anonymous as molecules of air? There is a certain invisibility that smartphones obtain when the interface is right. After enough scrolling, you can forget that you’re in a bed in a room holding a device and get completely absorbed in the stream of information coming at you through the screen. However, the seamless, anonymity going from one device to the next that Gelernter describes is absent from the present state of smartphones.  

Gelernter describes the Swarm as omniscient. The question of the omniscience of smartphones is interesting. As much as we offer our own data to our devices so they can conform to our preferences and behaviors, our devices are gathering data from us even when we don’t realize it. We are always surveying ourselves or being surveyed by our devices. Because we link our smartphones to other devices, all our technology is in constant conversation with each other, filling in the blanks of its users identity. That feels like omniscience. 

Unlike Gelernter's prediction, the omnipresence is inescapable. As convenient as smartphones make our lives, it is at the expense of our privacy. To disable omniscience is to disable all the conveniences of the technology. Is the Swarm worth it?