Awake and Offline

Inevitably awake and asleep at the wrong times.  Four hours until I get up for a meeting and here I am in bed, typing away.

I think I might try a few days of internet isolation.  It's not like I post to the blog on a regular basis.  People read the blog on a less than regular basis.  If I deactivate or unplug my wireless card...  Just to see if I can get the words flowing again.  Just to piece together the sort of running internal monologue that used to, I think, flow through my days.  Nicoholas Carr has a point.  We think differently, in an age of broadband.

It's not like I don't have enough free time.  It's just that, sitting down at these machines, these marvelous distraction machines, entire days go by and all I've done is work my way through my Google reader queue and browse for ebooks that I don't buy (or I download a bunch of free, old ones I'll never read) and scroll mindlessly through whatever dreck my subconscious says is worth looking up or clicking on.  It's pacifying, relaxing, the way folks used to like to watch TV.

But I used to hate to see people watching TV like that.  I couldn't understand it.  And I swore I would never be so pathetic, as to do such a thing.  But good god.  Click click clickety click on the internet, to no end and for no end.  I know Cory Doctorow can handle it.  Can get books written and blog communities together and build an entire career on it, in fact.  The poster child for the distracted but productive modern superman.  

But my poor brain.  It needs the linear, focused passage.  I was raised on typewriters and piano practice, and told not to bother doing something if you weren't going to do it right.  In retrospect, those activities and principles were not the best to build a future life on, in the twenty first century.  My job is an exercise in multi-tasking.  It gets easier with practice, but I'd do better if mom had put an iPhone in one hand and a Nintendo controller in the other.

So, if no internet for a few days...  Well, I've got enough content on these computers and in this house to keep myself entertained for a year.  It shouldn't be a problem.

Really, I could roll this sort of self-denial into better practices for daily living.  Like jotting down the things I need to research (when there really is a thing I need to research), and then waiting for an allotted hour to get the research done.  Like back in the day when you'd go to the library to check your facts.  My online hour.  Just one.  Maybe I could post any composed and brilliant thoughts to the blog in that precious hour, too.

Limited access: because when we can do things anytime, we don't respect our time.

Here is a quaint memory:  I used to write a monthly newspaper column for our local weekly.  I remember mailing mailing it in, stamp and envelope and all, the week before it was due.  And if I was running late, I'd ride my bicycle over to the offices and hand it to the editor.  This was how content was delivered.  Research was done at the library, words were typed up at home, and work was brought to a building.

Newspapers.  Were those ever cute, or what?

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I remember talking to this girl in high school.  She seemed very smart - honors classes and all that - and very pretty.  She was the sort of pretty that comes from training to be a ballet dancer for the first sixteen years of her life and then her breasts came in just a bit too grandly and there was the end of the ballet dream.  So when we had a conversation I was inclined to talk to her a great deal about everything that came to mind, since when a girl like that is listening to you, you'd better be ready with something to say - especially if you couldn't get by on your looks.  I'd go on about Stephen Hawking and the philosophy class I was taking nights at the community college and whether the rules of mathematics had to be the same in all universes and whether piano keyboards would look different if we had an alternate history where the dominant tonal mode somehow settled into a different pattern of whole and half steps.

She listened politely to a lot of this and then asked, "What's it like inside your head when you're not talking?"

"Pretty much like this," I said.  And then, suddenly horrified by the alternative, I asked, "What's it like in yours?"

"Really," she said, "most of the time...if I'm not doing something, that is...it's just...quiet."

"No words at all?  Just silence?"

"Well, maybe I'm thinking about my homework, or dancing.  Just a little.  Or, if I'm watching TV, of course there's the TV.  While I'm watching it.  But no.  Otherwise, it's just quiet."

"So, at lunch, riding the bus, taking a walk, lying in bed at night, there's no words gnawing away at you up there?"

"Nope."

"Just quiet."

"That's pretty much it."

It struck me as a tremendous and tragic waste that such a smart and pretty girl could pass through so much life without a single thought in her head.  And back then, I had no idea what that kind of silence could feel like.  It was inconceivable, like trying to imagine what you're going to think about after you die.

The ironic thing about that girl...today she's at an Ivy League college doing research into brain structure and the physical roots of consciousness.  So a mind that was just...quiet apparently worked just fine for her and her career.

I skipped college altogether.  And now my brain lapses into long passages of silence that shock me with their breadth, at their conclusion.  Some of those silences are filled only with the clicking of a mouse and flashes of content that are gone as soon as they flash across the retina.  Maybe if I take away some of those flashes, the silences can open up and fill with words once again.

On How We Come to Love what we Love, Including Old Things

Of those of us who have this attraction to old things – or affliction by them, more like – I suspect there are two types: those who came to it by love and those who came to it by privation. Either way the result is the same.

I originally settled on the manual typewriter because it was the most reliable piece of machinery I could get my hands on for $50. Once I had it, there was no need to pester well-meaning poor parents or tempermental rich grandparents for the likes of upgrades, ink cartridges, repairs, and diskettes. Nor was there any squandering of allowances, the earning of which was far too laborious and dear to apply to faddish devices.

I came to love my typewriters because they were mine, not because I'd had any particular draw to them in the first place. I suspect if the latest computers and printers had been easier to acquire, easier to replace and upgrade, I would have come to love those in the same way, through repeated experience of pleasure in their use. As it turned out, I wrote papers, stories, and love-letters on old machines, and so they worked a fetishistic magic on me.

Is this the healthiest reason to love something: because it is always there, and therefore convenient? But how about this reason: because it is reliable, and steady, and enduring. Certainly, we should take our time with things we are to invest our time and emotion into, just as we should with people.

After all, this is how we form the relationships that endure, among people: not from the hot-headed pursuit of the youngest and newest companion, but from the seasoning of shared experiences that accrue among those we find ourselves, by accident, convenience, or routine, in the presence of most often.

This is why, even though we have virtual access to over a billion souls through social networking sites on the internet, we spend the majority of our time on Facebook chatting with the folks we went to school with long ago. The seasoned relationships are the ones that mean the most to us.

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I've convinced myself this is a perfectly reasonable way to come to love something, this circumstance and convenience.

The alternative – determination and pursuit - is overwhelming. It requires constant search and discernment, such a connoisseurs effort which, when it comes down to it (and despite it may feel otherwise) is in the hands of advertisers and marketing men anyhow.

Self-determiners assign themselves labels. They tell the world they are “preppy,” “goth,” “thrifty,” “refined;” they're “Harley” or “BMW.” They seek out clothes, accessories, and friends that match their categories, priding themselves on unique taste. But really they only landed in that category because of the display at the Hot Topic or J. Crew, or because all their friends rode motorbikes and they wanted one too.

I understand this desire to assign myself to marketing categories.  I'm not immune.  “What are you into?” Classical music, retrotech, science-fiction-literature, hiking, flying. Voila mon profil. Without categories, how can I market my blog? How could it ever be monetized?

But in reality, do I really belong in any of these? I only practice classical music a few hours each week. I don't have the space to accumulate any old junk beyond a few typewriters and old computers. Science fiction doesn't turn me on to the extent it used to, and though I have a yen to re-visit Moby Dick, I can't locate that copy I bought back in 1992. As for hiking, though I think I'd love to spend months charting every mile of trail in Acadia National Park, in truth I only have the time and energy for local pathways like the power-lines across the street. Oh, and I'm a passionate private pilot, having flown a total of 38.25 hours - 19 years ago.

So I've got to stretch the labels to get them to fit.  And I came by each of these phases and faces by accident first, and preference only through time. Does it speak ill of me that there have been so many (also sailing, running, and pipe-smoking) that it becomes impossible to define this life with any focus? A more aggressive and motivated sort might have made a choice and followed it through to a level of perfection and professionalism that could guarantee good fortune and career.

Me, I'm left to muddle along as best I can. None of the labels will stick* and I am well-nigh unmarketable.

*Except that I grow old. And shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

The Immortality in Archives

On what media is written the content of our days? 

We flatter ourselves that we're all written down somewhere.  Someone's keeping track.  Someone knows about all those horrible and wonderful things you did, even the things you never told anybody.

I think we cling to the legend of Heaven not so much because we cannot comprehend the idea of no longer being alive and conscious (after all, we pass in and out of the alternative every night) but because, right now, while we are alive and awake, we cannot stomach the possibility that no one around in the future will remember us.

It's drummed into us from an early age, this need to be acknowledged and remembered forever.  At least it's drummed into those of us who pay attention to the rules of society and long to "do well".  We hand in our homework, show up for our exams, and wait with eager anticipation and apprehension for authorities to evaluate and rank us.  "The results of these tests will determine which universities will accept you, which employers will hire you, mow much money you earn and where you retire and die.  Our evaluation of your behavior will go on your permanent record."

"There's a permanent record?" we say.  "Thank Heaven for that."

A permanent record, chiselled into a database of stone. 

Once, they only carved statues of legends and heroes.  Only Caesar's face would be embossed upon the coin of the realm.  But now, we're told, there's a permanent record for each and every one of us.

Is this why we're blogging and tweeting and sharing our most intimate details on Friendface?  Look at what we pay for it: the loss of privacy, the marketing, the imposition and potential shame of shared indiscretions.  But they're all a small price to pay in exchange for the knowledge that our information is important to somebody.  We don't even care that other folks are making money from our data.  It's just flattering to consider that someone considers us worth paying for, at all.

We love grades, sales rankings, credit scores.  We don't even have to know what they are.  We don't even worry about whether they're correct.  It's enough just to know they're out there.

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Ah, but bigger minds than mine have touched on this already.  In The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, Rudy Rucker wrote:

Lifebox is a word I invented some years ago to describe a hypothetical technological gizmo for preserving a human personality.  In my tales, a lifebox is a small interactive device to which you tell your life story.  It prompts you with questions and organizes the information you give it.  As well as words, you can feed in digital images, videos, sound recordings, and the like.  It's a bit like an intelligent blog.

Once you get enough information into your lifebox, it becomes like a simulation of you.  Your audience can interact with the stories in your lifebox, interrupting and asking questions.  The lifebox begins by describing the retiree's common dream of creating a memoir and ends by creating a simulation of its owner....

A lifebox is a person reduced to a digital database with simple software.  So in my book title, I'm using lifebox as shorthand for the universal automatist thesis that everything, even human consciousness, is a computation. 

If this were true, our days could be written on anything.  (Since we know that we can run a computer processor with checkers -- given enough time.)  Elements of my father could still be consciously dreaming in the pages of the three typewritten journals he left behind, interacting wirelessly with the impressions they made upon me when I read them and the memories he left behind in the other living people who knew him. 

He's left and lost control over this afterlife, certainly.  That would be the appeal of Rucker's lifeboxes, then -- making the effort now to get them right so we're still the people we want to be once we're gone.

I think Rucker's full of crap, myself.  There's no way we're going to encode the complexity of our 100 billion neurons with their 100 trillion synapses in our blogs and twitter streams -- even if we live up to our promise to update our blogs at least once a day.  And when I go through my old journals, I have to say, the version of myself I've recorded there isn't someone I'd want to hang around with for more than half an hour.  What a drag he is!  And that's too bad, because this version of me, attached to these fingers typing this up right now, isn't too miserable a fellow.

We may live on in the minds of those who read and study the artifacts we leave behind, but that's not through computation or simulation.  That's through metaphor. 

And suppose for a moment we could upload enough of our consciousness to a lifebox to be able to live on in the minds of others.  Isn't that being just a bit selfish?  That folks remember us for a while is fine.  But to expect anyone to participate in a simulation of our consciousness after we've gone?  That's outright grabby.

No, we're not going to be able to preserve our own lives on foolscap or in silicon -- as much as I'm convinced this impulse is behind so many literary and artistic endeavours.  That doesn't mean our lives aren't written elsewhere, though.  Maybe in our DNA, or Saint Peter's guest-book, or the weather, or the water. 

After all, it's hard to watch the wind fight against the current and the tide, stirring the surface into all sorts of gnarly fractal waveforms, too complex to comprehend even if we could hold them still, which we never can, and yet so completely changed by the drop of a single pebble, dropped almost without thinking -- too hard, I think, to watch that even for a single minute and conclude that it signifies absolutely nothing. 

I think you could store a mind in that kind of complexity.  I think you could store everything there.

Anonymous Comments Turned On

The Wife just let me know that folks haven't been able to post anonymous comments to this blog.  Well, sorry about that.  Apparently Blogger assumes we don't know how to be nice to each other.

Anonymous comments should be working now.  If you still have trouble email me and let me know.