Branding and Distraction

The age of distraction is getting even more distracting. Just turning on a computer now means exposing yourself to notices and branding as soon as the electrons start to flow.

I get the Macintosh chime when I turn on my Apple. Then the anti-virus program pops up a window to tell me about how many threats it's protected me from. Clicking this leads to a web-site that tells me it's monitored 503 "suspicious processes". I guess I'm glad somebody's monitoring them. Launching Evernote--my preferred word processing and research utility--exposes me to little nagging ads in the bottom corner which I can only eliminate by giving them money. (And I would gladly pay them money if it meant a one time purchase. But Evernote wants us to subscribe, and I'm just not ready to pay a subscription fee for access to my own writing.) Then when I launch Firefox, the Google home page comes up with a notice that they want me to "Like" them on Facebook.

Good grief. I haven't read or written a single word yet, and my head is already spinning.

Is it any wonder we all have attention deficit disorder? (For the record, I don't. Or at least I'm not medicating myself for it.)

The question is, how much do I want to cut myself off from these distractions? In a very real sense, we go to our computers to be distracted, the same way we used to go to our televisions. (What's that? People still use televisions? I guess so. Just the other day I was floored by a co-worker who told me she didn't like football, but she always watched the Super Bowl for the commercials.) We want the unexpected. We want something marvelous and new to "pop up" and give us a little rush of endorphins, to make us want to click something. Maybe even want to want something.

Only the objects of desire we're presented with are so banal. The chance to "like" Google on Facebook? I don't think we have the choice of liking Google or not, since they're changing their privacy policy and our online lives simply are Google, at this point. Online security reports? I suppose I should be thrilled I can use this computer I paid a big chunk of salary for without having my bank accounts raped by phishers and malware. But it used to go without saying that you could use the tools you purchased, without them chiming in to tell you what a good job they were doing every hour.

It's the banal stuff getting pushed at us that's crowding out the interesting stuff we come here for. The dark forces that drive television are threatening to turn the Internet into something bland, something that encourages passivity rather than curiosity, and something that you have to spend more and more money, every day, to enjoy.

How do you keep your focus, on the Internet? How do you walk the line between being distracted by crap and finding the stuff you came here for?

Trying to Contact My Senator

Hmm, this is interesting.

I was going to send senator Kerry a quick email to let him know how I feel about the SOPA and PIPA legislation worming its way through congress. (Quick synopsis: I don't like it.)

Except when I click on his "contact me" link I get a 404 We're Sorry page.

Which is the same thing I get when I click on any link of his website.

So either he's joined the day of protest along with Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, and hundreds of others, or his servers are down, or he just doesn't want to hear what we have to say.

Either way, I don't like it.

If you're not familiar with this legislation, and you're at all fond of the internet (and if the idea of spending 5 years in prison for singing "Happy Birthday" on youtube seems unreasonable to you) I urge you to get educated quick and register your displeasure to your representatives. Google has a handy page set up for this.

Also, check out the livestream of the SOPA and PIPA protests, if you're on today.

Interesting times.

Things to be Thankful For

• An old car with the good manners to break down within coasting distance of my own driveway, on the night before a day off.
• A mother out of state for the winter who is willing to lend me hers.
• A sister coming to Thanksgiving dinner to drive me from the broken down car to the running car.

Seriously, as far as inconveniences go, this one was coordinated like a ballet.

Then there’s all the other usual stuff we take for granted: a roof over our heads (that only leaks when it rains really hard), a job where I get to work with lots of kind and genuine people, food for  the table, a wife who is not only willing but happy to cook it, family to share it with, good health, and of course, also, eggnog.

And whiskey.

I work with a woman who’s mother used to punish her, when she complained too much, by sending her into the corner to count her blessings. I do tend to grumble a lot. (That’s why you’re all here, isn’t it?) But this seems like as good a day as any to take her mother’s advice and reflect on the stuff that’s going right.

So, I’ll be over here in the corner.

With my eggnog.

Reading The Hunger Games feels like Reading Tomorrow’s Newspaper

I started reading the first book in the Hunger Games series. And I can see why it's so popular with today's teen set. The book reads like a dark-hearted SF thriller, but it paints a frightening picture of the world our children are set to inherit. 

Here is a society built on the ruins of the one we live in now.  It's seen the return of scarcity. It's seen the divide between first and third world conditions move within the borders of our own country. It's seen martial law in the wake of collapse, with capital punishment for theft imprisonment for hunting and gathering your own food. It’s seen a new world order with poor outlying districts feeding into the wealth of one centralized, prosperous capitol. Meanwhile, for entertainment, the "reality show" is carried to it's logical conclusion: children are forced to fight to the death on television for the public amusement, with a supporting staff of stylists, producers, "game designers," and sponsors to make it all profitable. 

Granted, the Japanese got to the conceit of kids fighting to the death on a reality show first, with Battle Royale. But their take on it was campy and cartoonish, their explanation for why it was happening was felt like an attempt to make light of problems in their public schools. But Hunger Games is deadly earnest, building on chilling economic and environmental trends. We've sown conflict around the globe; it seems inevitable that it's going to swing back and hit us at home, sooner or later. 

This is the world our children see coming: constant war, rising food prices, ceaseless advertising, the cheapening of human life in pursuit of grander virtual and vicarious thrills, the abandonment of basic rights and dignity for the poor, while the rich extract human blood in the form of tribute paid in human offspring. 

You think this sounds hyperbolic? Try starting your adult life under the burden of a student loan you can never hope to repay, from which not even bankruptcy is an escape. Kids today are slaves from the minute they graduate college. (It's a funny twist of fate that today, it's the smartest kids who don't go to school.) Already, teens face an adulthood without dignity. It's not that far-fetched to see their lives as cheap enough to throw away in televised games.

Our kids are facing the collapse of the public safety net as it's raided by the disinterested greed of their boomer grandparents, while they struggle in the moral wasteland provided by the "it's all good" parenting of their Generation X and Y parents. Reality shows show them that success lies at the end of a path of opportunism, brutality, and luck, while advertisements bombard them with tawdry and unattainable examples of what that success would be. 

The result is that life is worthless unless you're at the top. So, why not gamble it all for a shot at the prize? (Bankruptcy might not be an option any more, but kids might fight to the death if the reward were forgiveness of their student loans.)

Science fiction used to give us tales of exploration, invention, colonization and prosperity. I'm not sure what happened in the last 30 years, but SF has become something that feels chilling and malicious, more akin to horror. 

It also feels a hell of a lot more real.

On the Economy: Shrinking Pains

Natural systems do not grow forever. Populations either reach a certain point and then stabilize as they rub up against competitors and resource limits, or they drop off a cliff as they exhaust their resources. The real core of the economic crisis we are facing now is that the economy is an artificial system that has been built on a foundation of unlimited growth. At every stage it is simply assumed that growth is the ultimate goal. 

Sales had better be up, consumption had better be up, resource extraction and manufacturing and profits had better be up! 
 
Even as we're hoping our economy will generate more wealth and jobs, we're hoping for stabilization in world population figures. And there's actually good news here: we're seeing a slowdown in population growth. We may have passed the seven-billion-people mark, bet getting to eight will take longer than it took to get from six to seven. 

But consider: if the population doesn't grow faster this year than last year, how can we have sales that grow faster this year than last year? What happens when we reach the point where everyone simply has enough stuff, and stops buying more? And given that our currency actually represents debt (not gold, not grain, not any naturally occurring commodity), how can it continue to grow if people tire of borrowing to purchase things they do not need.

It becomes harder to make money. The incentive for crooks within the financial system to steal and cheat becomes irresistible, and soon the whole system itself is a farce. (See the Lehman Brothers collapse, the “too big to fail” bailouts, etc.)

So how can we build a financial system without a foundation of constant growth? 

Our current situation is unprecedented. The world population has never faced a slowdown in growth, never mind a decline. (The Black Plague may have decimated Europe, but it put just a tiny dent in the world population.) This turnaround is something to celebrate. It's a success of the world's increasing prosperity and education. Given that no population can grow at an accelerating pace forever (just ask any petri dish full of bacteria) we should thank our lucky stars that this is happening. 

But can we build an economic system that rewards stability instead of growth? Is it a matter of regulating the money supply? Could we turn back from debt based currency to a gold or silver standard? Or do we need to reconsider what incentives people respond to? Rather than measuring success as taking more profits than your neighbor, can we build a culture that fosters stable communities, humane working environments, and supportive relationships?

That's hippy-dippy, pie in the sky utopia talk, for sure. But the alternative sounds dreadful. If we can't adapt our economy to a population that isn't growing at a constantly accelerating pace, then both the economy and the population are bound to collapse with a viciousness that is as brutal as it is inevitable.

I don't hear anyone else asking these questions. The silence horrifies. 

Instead, I hear Bill Clinton talking about ways to restart growth. I see companies scrambling to drive down costs to save their profits in the face of declining sales, producing cheap products that suck in working environments that are inhumane. I sit in meetings where everyone breathes a sigh of relief if our percentages are just a little higher than last year's, and we say, "well, at least we haven't started to slow down yet," in the knowledge that the minute we do, we're dead. I hear European politicians saying things like, "Only growth can lift us out of the Eurozone crisis," but they never say where the growth is going to come from, who is going to buy their exports, or what fuel will power their factories to run faster than they're running now. And then I see reports of entire cities in China, skyscrapes and condominiums and shopping malls, vast and shining and new, without a single person who can afford to live in them. The government is building for the sake of their growth reports, while their citizens live in shacks, five families to one bathroom, not a one of them able to afford the empty prosperity looming above them. 

The wealth is there. The buildings are there. Why not just let the people...move in? 

An economic crisis seems like the most artificial folly on the face of the planet. Markets crash; the sun still rises, the tides flow in and out, birds still sing, all oblivious to the fact that debt figures hit some number and stocks are in the tank. An ounce of gold doesn't know it's worth ten times as much because people are desperate. 

This is a collapse of fiction. But it's been such a rewarding fiction, for so long, that we'll struggle to maintain it for as long as we can. We'll give absolutely everything we can to believe our lives can keep going on like this forever. We'll give everything we can, until we have nothing left.

Room for Second Life in a Busy Life?

It seems that the more technology I accumulate around myself, the less meaningful work I get done. I used to be able to write a story every week on my typewriter. Now, I’m lucky if I get past checking my email accounts, blog feeds, and facebook statuses.

Then, for some reason, as if I weren’t distracted enough already, I got the grand idea of checking out Second Life. Now, that has sucked up pretty much any free time remaining to me.

Oh, but it is fun! And it’s satisfying, this feeling of being thoroughly engaged, always something to check up on, always someplace to go -- without leaving your chair. And at the end of the day, I have no piles of paper bearing down on me, as I did in the old typewriter days. Am I worse off for not having told a story in the old, traditional medium? Would anyone have read it?

In Second Life, I can listen to a concert performed by folks playing together from  three different continents. I can chat with Australians and Englishmen and South Americans all at the same time. I can be told off by an irate Detroiter in one window while psychoanalyzing a graphic designer with low self esteem in another. I make friends with people from around the globe, and suddenly I’m concerned about what time zones people live in. What time is it in Poland? In Peru? There are friends there I want to talk to, when will they all be on? 

Second Life is rather like World of Warcraft, only instead of all the dull leveling up and treasure hoarding, there’s conversation, art, and music. Not all of the highest caliber, of course, but that’s true of everything. As Ted Sturgeon said, “97% of Science Fiction is crap. But then, 97% of everything is crap.”

My Puritan Guilt has me thinking this new time-sink is a terrible development. If I go after the Nanowrimo trophy this year, I’ll have to set Second Life aside for November.

Ah, but I am still holding down a full-time job, finding time to visit the folks on occasion, scratching the dogs on the head several times a day. And I’ve even gotten outside to replace that broken window-pane and re-putty one and a half whole window sashes. (Only 20 and a half more to go!) I’m going to play the moderation card on this one, just as with booze and tobacco, and say it’s all right.

Will we continue reading stories in the century to come? Storytelling survived radio and television, although it was certainly changed. But now that the words-on-paper format seems stuck in precipitous decline, just what forms will our fictions take in the future? And will we miss the old ones? Can culture survive a population that is aware only of distractions and diversions, and never focused on real content? How can we remain aware of current events when there’s a party going on every minute?

If Romans had computers, would the end of their world have looked a little like this?

The Growing Length of Novels

Is it just me, or do books seem to be getting inordinately long, these days?

Time was, people would joke about the fantasy-novel doorstoppers that Robert Jordan and the like put out, as if the girth of their text was somehow indicative of a stretched-out, poorer quality story. When the Wheel of Time series grew to eight, then nine, then ten volumes, it turned into a kind of self-parody, mocking itself just by sitting there on the shelves. (It’s still not complete, although Jordan has passed on.)

George R.R. Martin has been producing similarly sized volumes, and who knows how big Game of Thrones is going to turn out to be before the final tome takes its march across the bestseller lists. The difference is, these books are actually pretty good, and they’re making their way into the mainstream with a little help from HBO. Then there’s Patrick Rothfuss, whose Name of the Wind was perhaps the most beautifully written book I’ve read in the last decade, and who followed it up with Wise Men’s Fear, promising more of the same exquisite storytelling spread across 1,200 pages. I haven’t cracked that one yet, because I needed a break from fantasy.

Instead, I turned to my other great reading pleasure, Science Fiction, and turned to Neal Stephenson’s latest, Reamde, which title references to a computer virus within the book whose name ironically refers to the brief “readme.txt” files which have accompanied software installations since the dawn of DOS. Now, Stephenson has always written big bricks of books – for a more extreme example check out his System of the World saga – and to make his own process even more masochistic he does his first drafts in fountain pen. But I’m losing interest in Reamde about halfway through, and I’m stuck wondering if, having invested so many hours into the first half, it’s more of a waste of time to abandon the story and forget about it, or whether the greater waste would be forcing myself through to the end of a book that I have lost pleasure in reading. (This is an especially Puritanical dilemma and I wonder if anyone besides a New Englander could truly understand it.)

Then I heard that one of my favorite “literary” writers is coming out with a new novel: Haruki Murakami. His early books were spare little gems, perplexing and fascinating, inviting repeated readings and careful reflection. But it turns out his new book, 1Q84, is going to clock in at – you guessed it – over 1,000 pages. I’m not sure I can wrap my head around that much Murakami, and I’m not sure that I want to.

It’s as if someone told me they were going to bring me a fine, single-malt whiskey, and then they delivered a keg of the stuff, and then told me that, to really appreciate it, I’d have to drink the whole thing. Whiskey just isn’t supposed to come in kegs. Some things are meant to be sipped and savored, and when you see that much Murakami in one barrel, well, it makes you wonder just what you’re getting.

David Foster Wallace came out with Infinite Jest in the mid 90s, and at the time that was an anomaly in the literary world: 1,300 pages including 300 pages of rather self-indulgent footnotes. Passages of Infinite Jest were lovely, though, and heartbreaking, and brilliant. I’m wondering if my experience with Murakami will be the same as the experience I had with Wallace. I enjoyed it for about 400 tightly packed pages (including time for those footnotes) before realizing I’d been reading the same book for an entire season without getting halfway through, and so I put it down and never came back.  Still, I kept a lot of those characters and situations present in my head in a way that just hasn’t happened with many books, since. Hal, the tennis academy, the AA meetings, the league of wheelchair assassins, the VHS tape that kills you if you watch it…they’ve all stayed safely tucked away in my noggin for the past 15 years, and I didn’t even finish the damn book.

Maybe I can sip my way through half a keg of Murakami and that will be enough.

So what’s behind this trend towards freakishly long books? Did the publication of Infinite Jest win support for a format that had previously been mocked as appropriate only for low-rent fantasy literature? If so, then why the sudden increase in book-girth now, fifteen years later? Have paper and printing costs been dropping? Hardly, paper and ink is more expensive now that it has been in quite some time, and books have to be deeply discounted to become affordable.

Are editors just getting lazy? Or are authors becoming divas, unwilling to compromise and have their words cut? It does seem that, as a writer finds a measure of success, their books grow and grow as editors and publishers seem afraid to ruffle the feathers of their proven cash cows. Which is too bad, because a lot of these books would be better if they were shorter. And these editors should realize that cows don’t have feathers.

There do seem to be several factors that may contribute to this publishing trend:

• e-books have no printing costs, and as more and more of a book’s sales go digital, buyers may actually feel they are getting more of a bargain when they download a bigger file. So I wonder, do the increased sales of a digital book offset the increased paper and ink costs of printing a huge doorstopper volume?
• The bargain effect probably applies to physical books too. This is the age of Wal-Mart and the wholesale club. When it comes time to buying a book people really want to stock up. The difference between a 300 page paperback and a 700 page paperback is usually just a dollar or two, so it feels like you’re getting ripped off when you buy the smaller one.
• People have become accustomed to long serial formats, and this taste has grown beyond fantasy trilogies and those mystery series themed with numbers and letters and gotten right down into the fabric of the single book. Those Game of Thrones books are like trilogies within trilogies.
• The rest of our culture is increasingly short and fragmented. We want to set aside our Youtube clips and our Twitter feeds and have something familiar to pick up and read, night after night. People who still read might not be looking to books for an escape into something different, but rather for the comfortable feeling of returning to the familiar.
• Computers make it easier to write at length. Authors can ramble on at a PC with words per minute unseen in the days of flowing ink and mechanical type-bars. Computers make it easier to edit, too, but they seem to have the opposite effect. Writers will let it all pour out, confident they can go back and cut and re-arrange. I suspect that, when words seemed more indelible, that more thought was taken in putting them down in the first place.

Stephen King blames the decline of the short story on people’s laziness. Once you’ve invested the mental energy it takes to enter the world of a story, it just seems like an awful lot of work to start from scratch, again, 30 pages later. And while I rather agree with him, that’s not why I’ve never been a fan of the short story. I just find that, after I’ve read a book of short stories, I can only remember a couple of them, and my memory of those is usually gone within a week.

Novels really have time to work their way into your mind and stay with you, to remind you of things you’ve long forgotten, and to even change you if you need changing. They have always seemed, to me, to be the form of art most effective at repaying the investment of my attention.

But 1,000 freakin’ pages? You’ve got to be kidding me. I just don’t have that kind of time to invest.