Douglas Coupland: IQ

Today I wondered, “If the internet had an IQ, what would it be?” And so I made a guess: 4,270 — a four-digit IQ. Yes, I know the internet is just a tool and not a sentient being. But one can dream.

I remember growing up in the 1970s when IQs were a big deal, and we were always getting tested in school. But the intelligence that was being measured wasn’t empirical (if such a thing is even possible).

Rather, IQ tests quickly became about nothing more than the tests themselves. Do you know how these tests work? Does that question remind you of other similar questions? Oh, it’s the rearrange-the-cubes question again. And so on.

There was a magazine in the late 1970s called Omni that catered to the culture of people who take IQ tests. There was something kind of sexy and key party about it — I think that’s because the genes for intelligence are right beside the genes that predispose a person to nudism. I think Valhalla for the Mensa set was group sex with Xaviera Hollander on a houseboat with walls covered in macramé hangings and fencing swords.

I was born at the very end of December, so I was always the youngest person in my grade. I was also terrifyingly skinny, so my way of surviving was to be the smartest one in the class, which is not the same thing as being actually smart — just smart within the framework of school.

It did the trick and I emerged in one piece, and after high school I did one semester at university where it dawned on me: I don’t have to be smart any more. For the first time in my life I was getting Bs and Cs and it was like a drug, and I really remember feeling high when I got my first D. I quit, went to art school and I’ve never again wanted to enter a situation where I have to take a test.

I think people are smarter now than they were in, say, 1995. I’ve touched on this before: we all feel stupider yet I think if we were to compare IQs from then and from 2015, we’d find that our new standard IQ is more like 103. People time-travelling from 1995 to 2015 would probably speak with us for a few minutes and then quietly excuse themselves and go meet in the kitchen and wonder what drug we’re on. “They have no attention span, and the moment you tell them even the slightest fib, they reach into their pockets, pull out a piece of glass, dapple their fingers over it and then look up at you and tell you that your fib was a fib. What kind of way is that to live life?”

If you go online there are all sorts of free IQ tests you can take but I can only guess that they’re going to rate you as a genius while they ravage your hard drive, steal all of your passwords and give you a wicked case of malware.

A few years back I had the perhaps singular experience of varnishing a gymnasium floor with a group of retired high-school principals. I asked them what they did when they had a problem student, which is not to say a low-IQ student — problem students tend to be smart — and they told me, “Oh that’s easy. Once we reached the end of our rope we simply phoned their parents, who were, of course, expecting more bad news — but in a reverent tone of voice we’d tell them, ‘We think your son/daughter is truly gifted. They’d be much better served at a school that has better resources for brilliant students.’ Nine times out of 10 they were so floored, they’d just murmur a timid thank-you and a week later our problem student would be gone.”

Lately I have made my peace with the fact that I will never be intelligent enough to turn on my TV. I upgraded everything last year; there are not two but three remotes on the side table gathering dust. I stare at them, and then I look up at the cool, judgmental blackness of my large new flatscreen, and then . . . I open my laptop’s lid to binge on season three of Homeland. I mean, what on earth is HDMI? (I know, I know: HDMI is High-Definition Multimedia Interface, an audio/video interface for transferring uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant source device.) But couldn’t they have just named it Walter? Or Trish? People, how hard would that have been?

I’m writing this at Toronto’s Pearson Airport at gate E72. Instead of endless banks of airport furniture they have elegant marble tables with leather furniture, and each seat has its own iPad and an electrical outlet. The WiFi is, of course, smoking hot. There is also no sound in this airport lounge, which feels like the Airport of Tomorrow. Children who would otherwise be shrieking from sugar spikes and boredom sit calmly and play video games. Everyone is feeding on data and images and sounds. Information flows in and out of these portals. Nobody is getting stupider during this whole process. Words are being learnt. Connections are being formed. Patterns are being recognised. The next kind of intelligence is being crafted before my eyes, and it feels like a much more useful sort of intelligence opposed to knowing how to rearrange cubes on a piece of paper.

Oh yes, my IQ is 510.

Douglas Coupland’s most recent book is a non-fiction title, ‘The Age of Earthquakes’, published by Penguin. Twitter @dougcoupland

Photograph: Ken Mayer Studios/Douglas Coupland