The little town of Trompsburg in the Free State lies not too far from Bloemfontein, a city famous, among other things, as the birthplace of JRR Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings series. But Trompsburg can lay claim to its own scribe of legend and lore: Arthur Goldstuck, who has turned his love of urban legends – the kind of “too crazy to be true” stories we tell each other around the braai or water-cooler – into a publishing industry.
As a child, growing up in the quiet dorp, just off the freeway from Joburg to Cape Town, Arthur would immerse himself in his love of reading, developing a taste for far-out tales of battles and conquests in outer space.
He later became a journalist, focussing on investigative news and the fast-changing world of computer technology, an interest that led to his pioneering reporting on the phenomenon of mass communication that we now know as the Internet.
Those science fiction tales of Arthur’s youth may have been a little far-fetched, but as he tells Ruda in this interview, the 21st Century is beginning to feel more and more like Star Wars brought to everyday life. The big new trend is Virtual Reality, and it holds the power to forever change the way we see the world, as we journey boldly towards the ultimate destination: the future.
Transcript:
R: Hello, and welcome, once again, to the Change Exchange, where we have a visitor today that many of you may know … Arthur Goldstuck. You’ve been part of our lives and on our screens … I remember interviewing you probably 20 years ago for the first time.
A: Hello Ruda. It’s been a great journey.
R: It has been a great journey. And it’s two major fields of interest: Technology and – what you call – social culture?
A: I refer to it as popular culture, but other people might see it as something different … Subcultures, for example, so anything from popular music, rock music, through to urban legends have been part of my passion. And it all falls under that category of popular culture. But I love exploring subcultures.
R: You started studying quite a general course. What was it? A BA in … What was it? Industrial psychology and what else?
A: My major was English because I wanted to go into journalism and I wanted to become a writer. But everyone told me you can’t make a living that way, and I needed something to fall back on. So my sub major was industrial psychology.
R: But then you did go into journalism?
A: And then luckily, while I was studying, I began working freelance for whoever would take my work. And by the time I finished university I was working fulltime in journalism.
R: Do you remember the first time you saw something published with your name on it?
A: The first time I saw something published was while I was still at school. I wrote an article for “The Friend” which was a newspaper serving the Free State and the only English language paper in the in the Free State at the time, now defunct, unfortunately. I remember as a young kid going on a school tour of their offices, and how enthralled I was at turning lead type into newsprint, and – in fact – I got my name in lead type back then, still a memento that harks back to what’s now a few centuries ago, and not just the last century, but my first newspaper article ever I submitted to “The Friend” …
R: What was it about?
A: It was about an old man in the town where I grew up – Trompsburg, in the southern Free State. And the oldest man in the town – his name was Frank Clemens – and he was in his late 90s and he had been major of Trompsburg many times over the years, but he was a very avid reader of the friend, even into his late 90s. And he was the first person in Trompsburg to get a TV set. And because we were family friends with him, we used to go over and watch Pop Shop in house, on his black and white TV. And I think it was around his 95th birthday, I wrote a profile on him and sent it to “The Friend” and they published it on their front page. It was very exciting.
R: You said that your interest in technology actually also started in the library in Trompsburg?
A: That’s right. Trompsburg had a public library where they had one shelf of science fiction novels. And I love science fiction – I loved the idea of space and astronauts and aliens, et cetera. And as soon as I was allowed to, I began taking out the science fiction books from that library … ‘Round eight, nine years old. And I eventually read every science fiction novel that they had in the library, so back then already I was ready for the future and I was waiting for the future and wanting to be part of the future that I read about in these science fiction novels. I didn’t see it as purely fiction – I saw it as a vision of the future that I wanted to be part of.
R: And if you think about it now? Is that true? Does science fiction foreshadow what happened? Or what we learned later?
A: The irony is that the science fiction I was reading back then was very unrealistic, because it focused quite heavily on what you might call Space Opera, which is battles in space. The Star Wars type scenario, whereas the real science fiction that became reality, came quite some time later. There was a movement called the cyberpunks and it was sparked to some extent by a novel called New Romance by William Gibson, and he coined the term cyberspace, and that novel, in fact, almost set out what the internet would eventually be, with one exception. He saw people plugging themselves into it, directly …
R: Matrix style?
A: Almost Matrix style, except they weren’t part of an alien experiment. They simply, by plugging in directly via their brains, they were then connected to this cyberspace, whereas the cyberspace we have today, we still have to interact with it, indirectly. But even there, we’re seeing more and more intense interaction. So it’s not just typing and looking at the screen, it’s also gesture command, voice command, and eventually it will be mind control as well of this inner space that we’ve created and it’s become a bigger and bigger universe. The science fiction that probably began in the 1980s is what we are almost seeing as reality in technology today.
R: That’s so fascinating. You worked as a journalist. What was your beat? Did you do regular news reporting at any time?
A: I had two distinct careers running in parallel to each other. The one was working my way up through the newspaper world, and the other was working as a freelance journalist for magazines, starting with music magazines, writing for … In the early 1980s for R20 a feature, which even then was a pittance, but it got my foot in the door and it enabled me to experiment with writing and explore my writing and get to know the music scene as well and …
R: Did you just do it for fun? Or did you do it as the first step on the way somewhere?
A: It was a passion for music and a passion for writing, and the two marrying each other. I wanted to be a music journalist – that I saw as my short to medium term ambition. At that stage I didn’t have this idea of being a technology journalist, because there was so little to say about it. I did begin exploring what you could do with computers – that’s what fascinated me. And people are always startled when I say I’m not a technical person; I don’t know how a computer works. But what I do understand – and this goes all the way back to those days – is what you can do with computers. And that was my interest and passion right from the start. So one of my first technology features I wrote was for the SAA in-flight magazine and it was about how computers were going to be used to track the return of Haley’s Comet in the early 1980s. And that was a ground-breaking feature for me because it was my first technology feature ever published. And it’s also helped get me into that whole circuit of being one of the feature writers that can be accepted by magazines. Because it’s difficult to break into that world, but once you’re in it, it becomes relatively easy. And those were some of my springboards into the whole media world and the world of being a writer and a journalist and part of the music scene and plugged into technology.
R: So many irons in the fire. And if you have to distil that as a lesson to a young person who is setting out now? Is there something … Don’t … Okay, people say you can never make a good living as a journalist. Rather go and study something else. But you have found if you combined …
A: That was my very first lesson. It’s that if you have a passion and you really want to pursue that passion, don’t let people put you off, because if you feel strong enough about it and you’re willing to work hard enough at it, you can make it work. If you expect it to fall in your lap, it’s not going to happen. And you mentioned many irons in the fire – it was precisely because I was trying everything and pushing in all directions that I begin breaking through. If I was waiting for it to happen to me, it would’ve never happened and I wouldn’t be a journalist, but I was determined. And that’s another lesson – you’ve got to have determination and you’ve got to stick to it, and you’ve got to turn up to the party to be at the party, in effect. But the other big lesson, for me, is always, be open and curious. And that I think applies at any age, but it’s probably most important when you’re starting out or starting to think about your career. Be aware of the world around you and open to absorbing information about that world and from that world and viewpoints from people, ideas, perspectives, visions – and you never know what’s going to coalesce into something that is something completely different to what you imagined, but still encapsulates where you want to go.
R: Was there a time where you went freelancing, completely? Did you have a job at one point and then step off?
A: I always had a freelance job until 1992, about, so at the time I was working for the Weekly Mail and I had been news editor of the Weekly Mail, and they … Well, first what happened was I joined the Weekly Mail when it became the Daily Mail and their foreign page editor. And really loved the experience – you felt part of a great experiment and a great project and a cause. And unfortunately the daily paper only lasted three months, and they shut it down while they still had enough money to get the weekly edition going again, and had to get rid of a lot of their journalists. And a key moment was for me when they invited me to stay on as news editor of the Weekly Mail. And that was heading into the period where they broke the Inkathagate scandal, which completely changed South African politics. So it was exhilarating to be part of that and as news editor …
R: When was that? Mid 1980s?
A: Early 1990s. 1991, 1992.
R: So Codesa was happening already?
A: It was about to happen. It was at a time when the Third Force was at large, opponents of the State were being assassinated and the wars in the townships were raging, and while I was news editor, the chief photographer was Kevin Carter who went on to win the Pulitzer prize for the photo of the kid with the vulture hovering … over it in Sudan, or Somalia. I remember debriefing Kevin and his team when they would come back from the townships covering those wars, and the darkness in their faces … But also appreciating the deep passion with which they were doing their work. It was a huge privilege to be part of that kind of team – it was very exciting. But all along I was also pursuing my technology writing interest and I persuaded them to start a technology supplement – this was in 1990. So I was news editor from 1990 to 1992 and in that period we started the technology supplement, which for about a year went very strongly, was great, the interest from advertisers in it and it was a very successful supplement, but it seemed to run its course and it didn’t have real momentum, but then the co-editor of the Weekly Mail – Erwin Manoim – suggested that we change the approach and we start something called PC Review – a computer supplement, because this is the emerging area of great public interest and it would have consumer interest – not just business or trends or grand vision interest, but direct, practical interest to readers.
R: To individuals.
A: Yes, so I agreed to become assistant editor of PC Review, and what happened in the meantime, having freelanced for various publications – I’d never, ever been invited on an international trip up to that point – and I was invited on SAA’s first flight to Bangkok, I think that’s what it was. And they invited me to cover it for the in-flight magazine, so I asked for leave from the newspaper, and they wouldn’t give it to me. So that was a pivotal moment for me. I had to decide how important is this job, and how important is it to be able to take this kind of assignment, and I figured that the assignment was actually more important, because I was writing for the Weekly Mail separately from my job as news editor, so I resigned as news editor, which some might have seen as foolish at the time.
R: Ja, because you step into the void. There’s no salary cheque at the end of the month.
A: Yes, exactly that. So that’s quite scary, but what we negotiated was that I would go onto a retainer with them and I would remain assistant editor of the PC supplement and I would also do news stories for them. And I began doing investigative news stories – in fact, I began doing that while I was news editor. And that was quite exhilarating – being an investigative journalist is the pinnacle of journalism in terms of your achievement of bringing information to the public.
R: What was the kind of thing that you were looking into at that point?
A: It was a wide range of things, and a part of it was looking out for stories that were under your nose, and no-one realised it was a story. So one of them, for example, was that a high proportion of police vehicles didn’t have number plates, for example. And I kept spotting this, and I thought it’s time to actually …
R: Say something!
A: Encapsulate this awareness into a story. And we had the photographers … in fact, Kevin, taking photos of all these cars without number plates, and we wrote a story and it was a shocking story from the point of view that it was always lying there, waiting for someone to expose it, and no-one noticed it. So that was on the one side, and the other side was one of my main exposes was a newspaper in Botswana that was being funded by the South African government, secretly, covertly. And it was a highly disliked newspaper by other journalists who weren’t working on it in Botswana, because they couldn’t understand how these guys were so well-funded, how they had the resources to do the things they were doing and the story exposed it, and I think within two or three weeks the newspaper closed down. And that was exciting, and also you realise the responsibility you have …
R: And it’s seldom that a journalist can see cause and effect, like that.
A: Absolutely. But that’s what was happening on the Weekly Mail in those days. So it was a tough decision from that point of view to move out of being part of the full time team. I loved running the newsroom as well, because I had such great people carrying out the assignments and bringing in the stories. And I didn’t see them as people working under me, but rather people working with me because many of them were more able and experienced than I was.
R: And your first book… Now I’ve gone blank …
A: Rabbit in the Thorn Tree.
R: Rabbit in the Thorn Tree. Did that come out before Internet Hitchhiker’s Guide?
A: Yes, Rabbit in the Thorn Tree came out in 1990 – in fact while I was news editor of the Weekly Mail. And I started working while I was on the foreign desk of the Weekly Mail and the useful thing there was that I would start getting stories being fed directly to me from the public as news stories – as opposed to picking them up as newspaper – or hearing of them from friends. But the Rabbit in the Thorn Tree was the big breakthrough and it was what you might call a sleeper, because when it first came out it got very nice reviews, but it didn’t create great excitement.
R: Maybe we must remind people what the Rabbit in the Thorn Tree was … It was the Barclays, at that point. It was their logo?
A: Barclays was in South Africa until the late 1980s, and then they disinvested and they became First National Bank. And when First National Bank launched, they decided to come up with a quintessential African logo, and the logo was a thorn tree. An Acacia. And what they didn’t realise about this, was that the stylisation of the thorn tree resulted in various shapes being visible in the tree itself. And the rumour began that the tree was actually a symbol of the ANC, which was banned at that stage … PW Botha was in power and a full page ad was taken out in many of the daily and weekly newspapers by the businessman Yusuf Surtee and he got a loan from FNB to place the ads calling for the unbanning of the ANC and PW Botha stood up in parliament and accused FNB … I think Chris Ball, at the time as CEO, accused him of being enemies of the State and traitors et cetera for calling for the unbanning of the ANC. And then people began looking at the logo and seeing proof that they were the ANC bank or that they were the bank who sympathised with the ANC. And there were two shapes that were supposedly proved it. One was a map of Africa – it was fairly visible, but very appropriate for an African organisation. But the white establishment of the time didn’t perceive themselves as being part of Africa and they actually saw Africa as the enemy, which tells you how dysfunctional we were from a psychological point of view in this country. But even more dysfunctional – people would see the shape of the rabbit – or a hare, rather – but they called it a rabbit just above the map of Africa. And they said that the rabbit was a symbol of the ANC – there never had been such a symbol of the ANC, and it was only when my second urban legend would come out that that finally got to the root of that particular belief. But before I come to that – the story then was that the rabbit in the thorn tree was proof that FNB was the ANC bank and part of a conspiracy against the government of the time, which was laughable even then, but it also highlighted the extent to which people were willing to fall for any story that gave them a sense of understanding what was really driving our society …
R: Then you also started writing on the technology side. And what’s your first book in that field?
A: What really happened was my third urban legends book … Maybe I should just quickly mention that the rabbit in the thorn tree … The origin of that particular legend, was that the police would go looking for the comrades in the townships in those days, because the comrades were fighting this sort of underground war against the police and they would go on patrols looking for comrades and either killing them or arresting them or taking them in for torture – let’s be quite blunt about it rather than questioning. And it turned out … And I heard this from police sources – the terminology they used when they went out on these patrols – “ons gaan hasies vang” – “we’re going to catch rabbits”. And the rabbit, in fact, was the police terminology for young ANC members. And that underlines the irony of people taking that as being a symbol of the ANC itself. So urban legends turn people’s perspective completely on its head and it often exposes their inner-psyche as well. So in that context, when the 1994 elections began approaching, the country exploded with urban legends and rumours, myths, beliefs, and the most famous one of all being the idea that the country was going to run out of food and groceries during the election period, and people must stock up because the apocalypse is coming and there was going to be a white apocalypse and black people would rise up and kill all whites. And after the elections they would be allowed to choose white people’s houses or cars or whatever the case might be. So there was that whole culture of fear in this country and they drove these rumours and beliefs. And it was very obvious that this needed a book, and I wrote a book called The Ink in the Porridge, which was subtitled Urban Legends of the South African Elections. And that book was not just about South African election urban legends, but also about the election urban legends in general. And I began exploring and researching urban legends from around the world and the great thing was that about six months prior to the elections, I got my first modem and signed on to my first electronic bulletin board, which in those days was the only way you could access the internet in South Africa, and the only way you could get email. And on the fledgling internet, which was before the web actually existed – you had this thing called the internet that had all kinds of communications tools on it. One of them was called Usenet, which was a network of discussion forums, and one of the discussion forums was an urban legends discussion forum – it was called Old Focal Urban.
R: So suddenly you had world-wide input?
A: I had this incredible access to people, and I was able to be part of the conversation as well, and through that forum and then through email conversations with people who participated in the conversations I collected a massive amount of material about urban legends from elections, going back hundreds of years, and I was able to then contextualise the urban legends that we made in South Africa and show that many of them were in fact not new. They were just new versions of what had been around for a long time.
R: It just strikes me that … I think we have forgotten that huge change, that now you can, in a moment, google something. You can find out what is this, who wrote that, where does it come from. Just the other day, that was impossible.
A: Yes, going back to 1994 when we had our first commercial internet service providers in South Africa, it felt revolutionary – it felt like this was a massive change that was coming. Especially having been reading science fiction and following computer usage trends and what people could do with it. The idea of computers all being able to connect to each other and one being able to disseminate and collect information so quickly and so easily – to me – felt like a revolution that was coming.
R: Ja, you noticed. The rest of us didn’t even – it didn’t even dawn on us until much later, when personal computers became every day.
A: I guess I was very fortunate from two perspectives – one that I’ve been writing about computers, I was looking for what was new and what was next in the world of computers, and the other is that I actually wrote a book using this internet thing as one of the main tools for producing the book. So I understood implicitly from the very start the potential power of this thing as a tool for productivity.
R: Well you tried it out.
A: Exactly.
R: As it was happening?
A: Exactly. And the introduction to … In fact, I then wrote an article in the PC Review called How the Internet Wrote My Book. And this was picked up by the technology writer for the Sunday Times – Greg Gordon – and he then did an interview with me on that topic. How the Internet wrote this guy’s book. And that article was spotted by the publisher of Struik, which owned an imprint called Zebra – a fairly new imprint. And quite incidentally going into a computer shop where I used to go and try out their new games and software – in those days you didn’t get review copies because it was too expensive, but I would sit in a corner of their shop and try out this software, and on one of those visits I bumped into Nick Pryke, the publisher of Struik. He was coming there to try and convince them to stock computer books, and the owner introduced me to him and he said: “So when are you going to write a book for us?” And I said: “When are you going to ask me to?” So he says: “Well, why don’t you write a book about this internet thing? I just read the article about you this Sunday?” So that article had sparked his interest in the idea of a book about the internet, and literally a year later, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet came out. And the funny thing about it is that when he suggested it, I said there won’t be much of a market for it, because at that stage there was still a niche computer interest, and he said it will grow over time and eventually it will become quite big. What we had no idea of, was that the wave was about to break in this country – still early days, 1995, but amongst businesses and amongst people in the know and the early adopters there was massive interest. It was hugely exciting. Everyone that was a part of that wave could see. And when the book actually came out, the book launch was at Eastgate – it was the opening of the Exclusive Books in Eastgate – so this book launched that branch. And the guest speaker was Jenny Crwys-Williams, who was already making a name for herself as the sort-of books …
R: Person.
A: Person, in South Africa. And the combination of having her there, having the internet thing and my urban legends books at that stage all having been best sellers, was like a perfect storm for me. And we had no idea how full the launch would be and how many books they were going to sell. It beat all expectations and they had to reprint the book in something like four weeks – and that’s when my life changed completely.
R: And you could take that on as a full time job, basically? Technology?
A: Pretty much. Up to that point technology had been one of the areas that I explored with great passion, and with tremendous activity in that area. But it was just part of what I was doing at that point. When the book came out, it became everything.
R: What are the big changes you see coming? Or the major change that we don’t notice yet?
A: The big change that’s coming doesn’t look like a big change, because it looks like a toy and it’s called Virtual Reality, so right now what you’re seeing is companies like Samsung and LG, Sony, HTC all bringing out their versions of Virtual Reality headsets. And Facebook itself bought a company called Oculus Rift, which is at the leading edge of virtual reality. So people look at this and they say no-one’s going to walk around with those, so obviously that’s not going to change everything. But the poor relation of Virtual Reality is waiting in the wings, and that’s called Augmented Reality. And that’s where you overlay information in the real world. Virtual Reality closes you in, into an artificial made-up world, whereas Augmented Reality overlays information onto the existing world or overlays experiences. So it can be something that’s not real, for example with Augmented Reality you have a visor on that’s connected to a computer or has got information coming into it that tells you that a hole has opened up in the floor, for example. That’s what you’ll see through the lens – you’ll know it’s not real, so it’s not scary in any way, but in the future it might become so realistic that you can create experiences where people can for example be trained in a battle zone, in a electricity substation – all kinds of areas where in the real world simulating that would be highly dangerous. Whereas in Augmented Reality it feels like you’re there and you’re interacting with it, but you’re also part of the regular world. So that’s just a very basic way of explaining it. Examples of Augmented Reality was Google Glass, which failed completely, because what it did was it expected people to buy a one-size-fits-all set of glasses that they would put on their head and walk around with it, with a little screen in the corner and a red light that tells everyone in your environment that you’re invading their privacy. So you looked creepy and most of the people using Google Glass were actually quite creepy when they were using it. So it was a social disaster, so it’s flopped completely, but what it highlights is that in future you won’t need to buy a set of glasses, you will choose the glasses that suit you, the style that you like, but you’ll probably be able to clip something on to it that for the right environment will overlay information onto your glasses. That’s the one direction it will go in, the other direction is that you will have Augmented Reality goggles, visors, headsets et cetera where you interact with the real world depending on the level of power you want, the level of definition – if you want it to be really high definition, high resolution images being overlaid – you will probably need a visor certainly in the next five to 10 years before the technology reaches a point where any surface can be made as high definition or high resolution as you want. Another exciting area to just mention is at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Sony launched a tablet with a projector built into it, that projects the interface of the tablet onto any surface, and that surface becomes interactive. So we’ve had tablets and smartphones and other devices that project an interface or an image onto a surface – but that surface hasn’t been interactive. You still have to work on the device. Now, you leave the device there and you go and you interact with it on that surface.
R: Even if it’s against the wall?
A: Against the wall, on a desk, on any flat surface where you can actually see it, it becomes interactive, because the device is picking up your gestures in relation to what it’s projecting. And what that tells us is that before very long we’re going to start having smartphones that actually don’t exist at all. You’ll be wearing an activity monitor – so I’m wearing a FitBit right now – that’s this year’s hot technology for activity monitoring. But next year it might be a device that projects a smartphone onto my wrist or onto a surface – a kind of Iron Man-type projection onto a surface and I’ll key in the numbers on that surface. I won’t actually need a watch – or I won’t need a smartphone because it’s all built into whatever I’m carrying on me. So if you can put it into a wrist, you can put it into a necklace – your necklace could be your smartphone, and then you start seeing the kind of Star Trek. Star Wars type technology becoming a reality. And all of that technology is already possible because it’s being demonstrated by right now.
R: Thank you so much! This is fascinating.
A: Thank you.
R: You must go well into this future.
A: I’m looking forward to the future – as I always did!
R: Thank you very much for being with us, and enjoy the rest of this immediate day.
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