[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

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.