[I've been meaning to post this for a while. I've been hesitating because it feels unfinished, but I now think that's because the central idea is going to need a long time, and many posts, to percolate into anything really coherent. Consider this a disclaimer or an invitation, however you prefer to see it. Sorry about the glitchy typeface colouring – not sure how I ballsed that one.]
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I’ve been reading this doomsday book about the internet, called You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, which explains why I went offline almost entirely for a while there. The book just might, incidentally, help us understand why we’re so fucked up as a species.

I found the book last year, over-priced at Unibooks in Adelaide. I try to be frugal, but: it was called You Are Not A Gadget; the cover is a picture of a Kindle, with a prefacey chunk of text explaining why the author had chosen to publish the text as a book, not online¹; I immediately developed a mancrush on the author when I flipped to the inside-back cover and saw that he was a large, dreadlocked man with big, almond-shaped eyes and a pensive demeanour.

(I was going to insert a copy of the picture, but I can’t find it online – check out his website: see the picture with all the vines coming out of it? That’s the face from the picture I saw. Considering the website doesn’t appear to have had a makeover since 1987, I’m pretty sure it won’t change before you get a chance to look at it, whenever you’re reading this.)

Jaron Lanier is a philosopher and computer scientist who pioneered the development of virtual-reality technology back when we were grubbing for penny candy at the school canteen. So he was thinking about this stuff way before the internet went mainstream, and has pretty much seen it all. Now he is described by one critic as something like ‘the first great apostate of the internet age’, but I think ‘apostate’ is too strong – he’s critical of the internet, but has by no means forsaken it: like I said, he has a website, (granted, it’s old skool, so maybe he has – he’s not on Facebook or Twitter, though that doesn’t mean anything).

I love these books about the internet – I reviewed a couple over the last couple of years, including The Blogging Revolution (which sucked) and Say Everything (which didn’t, which was actually really awesome). I love them because they read like history books, discussing out-moded internet apps as though they’re relics of the past, artifacts of a bygone era, which I guess they are. Things develop so rapidly that you can write about something that happened in the nineties as though it happened a hundred, not fifteen, years ago.

Herein lies the rub: the central thesis of Lanier’s books is that the software systems developed to supply an interface for the internet – Google, Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, now Quora, soon voyURL and Diaspora, etc. – are at risk of suffering ‘lock in’, a syndrome that software programs suffer when they develop too fast for us to ever actually understand how to use them properly. I may have that wrong, but it’s my interpretation of his argument².

Lock in starts at an early stage of development – is basically a symptom of flawed design (cf. the universe)

Lock in occurs when a system is adopted so rapidly that so many other systems come to depend on it and you can’t really improve the foundation software because too many other things are tapped into it: like brain surgery – fuck with the brain wrong and you could lose all sorts of faculties (cf. Flowers for Algernon).

Lanier makes the example of MIDI, a protocol that has rendered music two dimensional, according to him, who is also a renowned classical musician on top of all the other awesomeness. MIDI was developed and adopted so fast that all digital music is now based on this protocol, which is apparently quite limited, rendering the various, mellifluous tones of organic music into a series of pixelatted sound waves that merely replicate the sound of music. Felice, who proudly wears a ‘keyboards are for typing’ badge, will appreciate this, though she dances like a motherfucker to The Presets, even when sober.

The MIDI example continues to pop up in the book, but is only a metaphor for the greater problem of lock in that is beginning to affect those who eke out any sort of existence online: due to the shortcomings of the software we are rapidly adopting in our daily lives, we are threatened by the risk of becoming defined by what that software allows us to express; worse than two-dimensional, we become Facebook-dimensional.

This made me wonder if ‘lock in’ could be applied to the human condition more broadly, but also to human emotion in particular: I remain convinced that humanity is yet in its adolescent stages, that each of us is barely protruding from the experiences and emotional manifestations of our upbringing.

Apparently we have ten per cent of our intellect at our disposal, a system of morals handed down by a guy with food in his beard, and an emotional range more phenomenal than any one of us can truly comprehend, yet we go around the place as though we’ve got our shit together, interacting with others, hating and loving each other, and really what we’re working with is intellectual, moral and emotional systems that have developed so rapidly that we don’t know how to use them properly. Each of these systems is dependent on others, and vice versa. We cannot remove ourselves from the world to wash that emotional baggage out of our pants, anymore than we could seriously expect to hang Google out to dry, or capitalism, or Justin Bieber.

And, well, that’s all I have got to say about that.

She had got the cancer ...

I’m worried about it, is all. I think it was Orwell who warned us that we would become trapped by the technology we thought would bring us to freedom. Also I read this other article about how social-networking sites are resulting in our own, special brand of cultural elitism, and that upsets me too, and I need to link back to this post to make my point in the one I’m drafting about that article.

Of course I don’t have any answers, just more questions, which is why I won’t stay off the internet for long.

1. because it is a self-contained, book-length argument, as which it would never be read online – part of his his whole beef: the fragmentation of reading, learning and dissemination of sound-bite knowledge
2. which, granted, is not the most coherent I’ve read, suffering from the very fragmentation for which he criticises the society of the internet age

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Maybe I’m naive, but I was surprised that T C Boyle’s story in this week’s Harper’s was boring.

I’ve heard good things about T C Boyle, and about Harper’s. Combine that with a story titled ‘What Separates Us From The Animals’ and I thought I was in for a sure thing. The reason I treat myself to a foreign magazine when I travel any serious distance is that I hope it will broaden my literary … ah, horizons. I guess it still did that this time, just … backward, to the horizon behind me.

I guess I pick up a magazine like Harper’s with the awareness that inside I will encounter a sample of the descendents of tradition, for whom I do have a healthy sense of respect, but so often this tradition strikes a chord so far from my intellectual and emotional interest that I wonder if I’ve stepped into a parallel universe where people find this quaint sort of bullshit actually interesting.

I could tolerate it if the insights into the human condition were powerful and formative, forcing me to reconsider my values or those of others I have encountered. Maybe the insights in this story did that for some readers. I know! Maybe a young, suburban Australian male with progressive, innovative pretensions is not among Harper’s ideal demographic!

But this reminds me of a debate my girlfriend and I have been having about the importance of opera companies and orchestras performing new work. She mentions often that opera companies and orchestras don’t perform a lot of contemporary work because the aged audience simply won’t stand for it – neither literally nor figuratively. The classics need to be represented in each year’s program to garauntee attendance – slipping the ocassional experimental contemporary piece in there is a considerable financial risk for the company.

She’s probably right, and maybe Harper’s is like that: keeping the interest of the older, more conservative demographic who can still justify the expense of a magazine, and might do so long enough to finance the emergence of the new writers.

But a magazine like Harper’s is not going to attract an audience appreciative of these new writers by continuing to publish stories like Boyle’s, about a middle-aged housewife who can’t tolerate the substandard personal hygiene of the doctor her town committee imported from the mainland. (If it weren’t for the reference to the internet in Boyle’s story, I could have assumed it was both written and set in the early twentieth century.) If younger audiences go and read elsewhere, Harper’s won’t have an appreciative audience for any new writing they publish.

If audiences stick with Harper’s, the new writers will descend so directly from the forefathers of tradition that literary progress will be significantly hampered.  Then, what if Harper’s audience dies before it begins publishing the sort of progressive stories a younger demographic might enjoy? Stories that are a bit more fucked up, a bit more contemporary, a bit less quaint and safe.

But, as Lara likes to remind me, if everyone thought like me the world would be in turmoil, so maybe the literary tradition represented by Harper’s constitutes a necessary status quo, an anchor for readers of the conservative left, around which they might hover safely, keeping their head above the water as they brush past more innovative, dangerous creatures under the surface with their legs.

Or maybe it’s me, and one day, when I grow up, I’ll develop an appreciation for Harper’s stories the same way I developed an appreciation for olives, avocado, tomatoes, mushrooms (all of which I hated as a child): by force-feeding them to myself and trying to think about what tasted good about them.

Yesterday afternoon, waiting for an author who was waiting on the other side of the cafe, I had a chance to read ‘Clinching’, a story by Emmett Stinson in the first issue of Kill Your Darlings.¹

Emmett, at 30-odd, is on the cusp of SIB’s definition of ‘young writer’, but I’ve been encountering his work since Wakefield published a University of Adelaide anthology he was involved with back in 2005 or thereabouts, when he must have been around 25: his Age Short Story Competition winning story, ‘All Fathers The Father’, reminded be of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith², back when I was still enamoured of Peter Carey. So he’s more of our demographic than, say Peter Carey’s.

Now Emmett has a book of his own out: Known Unknowns, one of the collections released as part of Affirm Press’s Long Story Shorts competition.

‘Clinching’ opens with Anna punching Steve in her sleep, and closes with him feeling sorry about it, because in between are all the reasons they know he probably deserved it.

In particular, something went wonky in their relationship when he got so arse-numbingly drunk he pissed in her sock drawer during the night.

Now, I actually did this once. I include no qualifier because the exact thing happened: I got so arse-numbingly drunk I pissed in my then-girlfriend’s sock drawer during the night.

These are unusually synchronistic circumstances, but this is exactly what I come to literature for: to read about the similar experiences of others, so that I might get a handle on my feelings about my own experiences. That someone might have even conceived the fictional idea of pissing in their girlfriend’s sock drawer is enough to make me feel fractionally less like a fuckwad: this might not have happened to Emmett, but some similar almost certainly did, and that’s why he’s writing about it. Or it happened to someone he knows.

Either way, the function of literature connecting others in isolation is what draws me to it. That’s right, I said ‘function’.

And I’m going to say this: the opening is the punchiest opening I’ve read in ages. It dragged me in, and the story held me captive until the … actually, until I realised the end would be too neat, which it was, and in the affected way that suggests it shouldn’t feel neat – like the story’s own background characters’ hair, described, as in myriad other urban stories, as ‘consciously unwashed for several days so it would droop in a manner that seemed fashionably messy and unaffected’.

Otherwise the writing is mostly absorbing, funny and a pleasure to imbibe: really, it slides into your mind like a first Friday beer. The observations about interpersonal dynamics are insightful and interesting. And the characters are plausibly flawed and flailing. This is my kind of story.

It’s a worthy story, but it’s unexceptional due to the fact it’s a little too expository for my tastes: the themes are revealed with eloquence, but the characters are kind of generic, due to there not being a lot in the way of description, action³, and setting. This could be a good thing: you might like this.

Other stories I’ve read by Emmett were exceptional, and some of them are probably in his debut collection, which you can buy from Affirm Press’s website. I would, if I were you.

If, understandably, you don’t want to take my word for it based on my reading of a few stories, here are some actual reviews of the actual collection: With Extra Pulp’s and Overland’s.

Onwards! Keep out of sock drawers!

1. I take my time: KYD are up to issue three now, and they’re a quarterly.
2. which is actually quite good – it carries remnants of Carey’s penchant for magic realism, before he got got corrupted by the Australian realist novel machine
3. read: movement, not gunfights

I got a copy of Harpers Magazine at the airport yesterday. It’s becoming a kind of personal airport tradition: I buy a magazine I wouldn’t normally read and take it with me on the plane, often as my only reading material, so that I’m forced to read it. It’s a good way to learn about a magazine.

This time it was Harpers, which I had heard was good from friends but never really bothered with. I’m glad I did, because I found something really inspiring in this issue: a story about perhaps the youngest newspaper publishers ever.

‘Final Edition: Twilight of the American newspaper’, by Richard Rodriguez, is a potted history of the San Francisco Chronicle – from its noble and humble origins as the brainchild of two precocious brothers, through its period as the authoritative paper in a two-newspaper town, to its recent slip into an MXesque daily.

As a whole, the article is a bit weak, really. It tries to make the case that the growing absence of obituaries is both indicative of, and the reason for, the demise of traditional/print/investiagative journalism. Maybe it was a typo, and everywhere it says ‘obituaries’ it was meant to read ‘classifieds’.

He also makes the huge claim that the narrative of San Francisco ceased with the death of columnist Herb Caen. Now, I get what he says about how the city makes the newspaper and the newspaper makes the city – each of their narratives are reflected in the other. This was a salient and illuminating argument, which further compounded my interest in newspapers as well as cities. But to say that a city’s narrative could be in the hands of a single journalist is just narrow-minded. What about the people who inevitably thought Caen was a knob? I’m pretty sure their narrative didn’t cease with his death.

I normally skip over the journalism-doomsday essays, because they seem to be nothing more than variations on the same pessimism, which I don’t need in my life right now. But it was familiar territory, in which I figured I would feel comfortable as I acquainted myself with this magazine. There’s heaps of other cool stuff in the article, which have nothing to do with journalism, but nonetheless resonated with me for various reasons.

Hoods

I could easily be mistaken for a hoodlum – tattoos, piercings, foul mouth, substance abuse, irreverence, contempt for belligerent authority … actually, depending on when you catch me, it wouldn’t necessarily be a mistake.

Well, according to this essay, the term ‘hoodlum’ comes from San Francisco, pertaining to young men who prowled the streets frightening Chinese people.  Richard doesn’t explain much more about the term’s original meaning.

Yeah, cool story.

Local Knowledge

Because I’d like to live in the States someday, I figure it wouldn’t hurt to get some local knowledge under my belt. In the essay I noted the following parallels between Australia and San Francisco:

• they both experienced an isolated bout of rapid growth at the hands of a gold rush, and their cultures have remained singularly stunted ever since;
• they both sport Australian blue gums; and
• they are both considered, by some, to be ‘provincial backwaters’ .

This means I can go to San Fran and pretend that I know shit.

Cos I’m Going to San Francisco

I’ve been interested in San Fran for a while, ever since I developed a crush on Dave Eggers in 2002: McSweeney’s is based there. Silicon Valley is also there, and I totally have a crush on the internet, so visiting that place would be almost as good as having a beer with Bukowski. Actually, that would suck.

Anyway, like I said, since 2002 I have developed the aspiration to live and work in New York, and my friend and I have decided to drive from San Francisco to New York when we get to the States, probably in 2011. I’d like for this journey to take as long it takes to read the Beats.

Also, it’s dumb but I’d really like to rock up in San Francisco with some flowers in my hair. I dunno, it’s just something I want to do.

I’ve heard it’s a liberal, progressive place, and I’ve since learnt in this article that San Fran was at the coal front of frontier American journalism. This doesn’t interest me so much in itself – it’s the people at the coal front of the coal front that really interest me. I love it when I inadvertently take inspiration from doomsday articles like this.

The De Young Brothers

Charles and Michael de Young were teenagers when they started what would become the San Francisco Chronicle in 1865. It was the town’s first newspaper, when the population was merely 60 000. By the time the boys were in their early twenties, the gold rush had run the population up to around 150 000 and the Daily Dramatic Chronicle, as it was then called, was one of the two papers in town. And it started with ‘a borrowed twenty-dollar gold piece’.

It gets better. They were psychos. Charles shot a guy called Reverend Isaac Smith Kalloch, who was both running for Mayor and running his mouth off about the brothers’ mum. He basically called their mother a whore.

Four years later and Michael was on the receiving end of the barrel. The way that Rodriguez puts it is classic, in its evocation of the era:

In 1884, Michael was shot by Adolph Spreckels, the brother of a rival newspaper publisher and the son of the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, after the Chronicle accused the Spreckels Sugar Company of labor practices in Hawaii amounting to slavery. De Young was not mortally wounded and Spreckels was acquitted on a claim of reasonable cause.

How’s that – ‘reasonable cause’! We’d be fucked today if defamation were ‘reasonable cause’ to pull out a hand cannon and go get yourself some justice juice.

Anyway, these guys are an inspiration to me, and might serve as a beacon of hope for readers aspiring to literary greatness at our young age. As Rodriquez says, they lived out the philosophy behind their newspaper: that it should ‘entertain and incite the population’.

Go do that. Good, I’ll see you out there.

Dave Eggers is neither a novelist any longer, nor ‘on a crusade for print journalism …‘ He is publishing an over-priced newspaper. That’s great, and his motives are noble, but he is no more on a crusade for journalism than he is for New Orleans victims, the Lost Boys of Sudan or the many disadvantaged whose stories he facillitates with the Voice of Witness series.

He publishes books about these issues. Yes, he gives the proceeds to his subjects, but he seems to have a new cause every week, and I can’t take him any more seriously than I take a hippy, whose catchall sympathies ensure their self-righteousness but limit their action to realigning the energies so that every cause gets a bit of their attention.

Eggers does more than hug trees. He’s a philanthropist, a conscientious publisher and an accomplished documentarian, and he probably has a heart of gold, but why the cult of activist-celebrity that surrounds Eggers every time he does something quirky that happens to address a current affair?

Eggers hopes newspaper editors will steal ideas from the San Francisco Panorama. Other people, are proposing real solutions like open-source and pro-am journalism (the institutionalisation of professional journalists working with citizen journalists). Leave Eggers to do what he does best – published mildly quirky stuff to adoring fans.

I am currently trying to get my shit together, and the likelihood of it ever happening is feeling increasingly elusive as I try to plan and work at the same time. Meanwhile I’m reading The Land of Plenty by Mark Davis¹, which isn’t helping.

He’s going on about the ‘prosperity scandal’ and the mythologies that have propped up the misconception that neoconservative, free-market orthodoxies have increased the nation’s wealth in the last thirty years. Instead of managing the nation’s economy, these policies have thrown caution to the wind at a time when Australia has been fortunate enough to be buffeted upwards by globalisation².

On some level Australia’s mind boggling economic ineptitude and short-sightedness makes me feel better about my own financial mismanagement. Especially when I remember how I like to make concessions for my life, based on reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being a few years ago.

By mashing Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return and Parmenides’ Theory of Opposites³ , Kundera’s concept of lightness might mitigate our bungling through life: if we are not burdened by the responsibility of having lived and learned from this life before, we are light – but our lives are meaningless, without weight; if we are burdened with this responsibility, our lives are weighty – but the repetition somehow gives them meaning, something to do with cycles⁴.

I’d say that we’re making it up as we go along, so as long as we endeavour to learn from our mistakes, our lives might be meaningless, but at least they’ll be pleasant. And by really bastardising it I came up with something like consolation: just as I have no experience of this life prior to my birth, I also have no experience of living in an economic environment that might have encouraged me to think long-term about my finances.

I had my parents of course, and they’re great with money, but I disregarded a lot of what they said. My bad. And anyway, I’m talking about how I might have turned out if I had grown up immersed in a successful, carefully regulated mixed-market economy – such as …⁵ Maybe I’d be able to make rent without living off beans and noodles for the following two weeks.

Seriously, I wonder about how a nation’s psyche might manifest as characteristics in whole portions of generations of citizens. People my age – teenagers growing up from 1996 to 2007 – were raised to believe that the prosperity we enjoyed would continue forever.

It didn’t, and the prospect of getting my shit together in this climate is all the more troublesome because of the pervasive feeling that I am pushing shit up hill.

Because we have both⁶ relied extensively on unexpected economic windfalls to give the impression of progress. We’ve worked hard, sure, but I’ve also been a lucky boy in a lucky country. Just as Australia has ridden the sheep’s back, then the miner’s back and now ‘the debtor-citizen’s back’⁷, I have coasted on the back of my parents’ success, on the back of a generation of false economic pretenses perpetrated by the Whitlam government through to the K Rudd, a bunch of noobs acting out on ideology rather than reason or good common sense.

And just like Australia, I have hit a brick wall after this unbridled, rapid and sometimes inexplicable propulsion through a false personal economy. About all that I’ve gleaned from living in this economy is an understanding of the ‘bubble’ concept: when the luck ran out and I needed to scrape myself up, I got my head around the bubble.

I feel like I’m back at the starting grid, but the race hasn’t stopped. Mark Davis’s Australia is at a similar point, from where it must learn from the failure of two eras of political consensus and move forward with a new vision. Get its shit together, basically.

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1. whose blog is unfortunately not working
2. Mark Davis, Land of Plenty, p. 255
3. which, the deeper I dig, seems to not exist – being, instead, a theory that Heraclitus presented and Parmenides rebuked
4. my intuition makes it more difficult to grasp weight than to grasp lightness – the fleeting, meaninglessness of a quick fling with life, a chromosome glitch and nothing more, that makes more sense to me
5. do these exist?
6. Australia and I
7. Mark Davis, Land of Plenty, p. 262

I often read claims like this:

So is YA taking over the grown-ups’ table? It’s a revealing question, steeped in the kind of condescension that assumes books aimed at young people are intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books, speculative or otherwise, that are ostensibly for adult readers. It’s also drenched in fear because, oh my lord, the young people are invading! With their depressing music and tight jeans!¹

But I’ve never come across anyone actually saying that about young-adult literature – that it’s ‘intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books’.

Are there cases of people saying or writing this? Or is this the inferiority complex of an adolescent genre in an adolescent culture in an adolescent nation?

Whatever the case, I’d like to know the source of this contention. It seems like something worth nipping in the bud.

1. I found this in an article by Karen Healey called ‘Where the Popular Kids are Sitting‘ at Strange Horizons, which I found through Alien Onion

I’m excited that Andre Dao is blogging at A Portrait of the Peach as a Young Lawyer.

I have known Andre since we employed him as the Voiceworks Production Intern at Express Media. He helped me produce a production manual for future Voiceworks editors – actually, I helped him, as he did most of the leg work.

He is an absolute gun. Since then, Andre has joined the Voiceworks Editorial Committee as Columns Editor, taken over the reins of Right Now, a human rights journal, helps to run Spill Collective and their beyond-epic warehouse parties and squeeze in a wee Arts/Law degree.

He’s the sort of guy who reapplies for internships two years after he was unsuccessful, gets the gig and then proceeds to demonstrate why you should have employed him way back then.

His musings on A Portrait are lyrical and expansive, about everything from a hat that’s not his girlfriend’s to the communal ruse of warehouse parties and some mythbusting on behalf of the yoof.

A very cool and inspiring guy – one of his own Remarkable People – check him out.

So it turns out this Lee Siegel fella might be a total douchebag.

He got busted for sockpuppetry at his blog for The New Republic, was hounded out of there and proceeded to get angry about internet anonymity, among other things wrong with the internet, in his book, Against the Machine. That this book is subtitled, ‘Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob’ should have said enough. Siegel’s posts have been deleted from The New Republic.

I though I might have found a discerning, dissenting view of the internet, which I have been extolling the virtues of endlessly, lately. But the more I delved into this character, the more I realised I was dealing with the sort of person who rallies against baseball caps for affecting ‘a lazily defiant casualness’.

This reminded me of Andrew Bolt hating on tracksuit pants once, which unfortunately I couldn’t dig out of the archives.

I’m dismayed that there is another person out there like Bolt. Maybe I should still give Siegel a go – Socratic ignorance and all that. But it’s hard to respect a guy who began criticising the internet when he found himself challenged by the unwashed masses of ‘blogofascists’.

I’ve been interested in this guy Lee Siegel lately, since I found his critique of What is the What and the cult subculture that Eggers has spawned with McSweeney’s.

This was the first well-considered and in-depth critical review of the whole phenomenon that I had read since feeling awkwardly contrarian in criticising What is the What myself on The Book Show. (There is another one here.)

Siegel has written a book called Against the Machine, which seems to be an outspoken, sarcastic and scathing critic of The Internet. Ray Bradbury would love him – Ray Bradbury, the guy who reckons we should burn books, but burning The Internet’s alright.

And I’m reviewing a book called Say Everything, a book about ‘how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and why it matters’.

And I’m starting this blog, obviously.

According to Three Degrees of Uncoordination, something is about to pop.

Meanwhile, check out this short video of Siegel acknowledging that he would never want to punch the internet in the face – ‘there are two many faces – it would take me a lifetime to do that’. The guy on the left’s a cack – he’s gotta be on coke.