Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
"The Joy of Quiet," a story by Pico Iyer in the NY Times (29 Dec. 2011) resonates with something I proposed a week ago at a Christmas party.
.
I'd been talking about plans to go away for a few weeks to finish a novel in draft. As usual, when such an idea is broached, people were quick to say things such as, "Hey, I know a great place on the coast down south" or "My uncle has a yacht crewed entirely by world-class lady beach volleyball players winding down between tournaments." That kind of thing is all very well, but what I really need is somewhere barren of interesting people to chat to (including beach volleyball players), at least one room with a blank wall and no view of wonderful scenery and, most important of all, no Internet connection. In fact, I'd been thinking of some grubby little upcountry hotel here in Thailand.
This is not mere eccentricity. Lots of writers feel the same way, I believe. At least one successful writer (whose name escape me just now) goes so far as to say no one can write a book in the vicinity of an Internet connection. That may be no exaggeration.
At this point my Sara, as is her wont, interrupts. "All you need is self-discipline," she says.
Uh-huh. That's right. I don't even have the self-discipline to activate Freedom, a program I installed on my computers that allows you to disable your communications programs for anywhere up to eight hours at a time (see “Addictions, spinal deficiencies and disciplinary infinite regresses”).
But let's get back to my proposal, which will make both me and some obliging investor rich overnight. All I need is enough cash to buy and renovate a smallish hotel, preferably here in Bangkok.
Here's the deal. We subdivide the joint into windowless cells, each of them equipped with comfortable office chair, desk, adjustable lighting, cot, a basic toilet and washroom, coffee machine, and, by default, no Internet connection. Oh, yeah--and a solid door that unlocks only from the outside.
Just a prototype; we'd tart it up somewhat.
Whoa. We’ll have writers queuing up to pay our exorbitant rates for incarceration till they finish their book in draft or else cry uncle (for which we’ll charge them a hefty penalty). The punters can order food which, for modest charges, our staff will slip through a slot of the sort used in solitary confinement in all the best prisons. Writing supplies, computer repairs, etc. will be provided in the same way.
The real money, though—and this, I have to admit, is pure genius—will come from what we'll charge for temporary access to the Internet. Clients who just can't manage the cold-turkey route may submit a formal written request, agreeing to pay ridiculous sums by the minute for the privilege of being allowed online for a stipulated time. (Of course clients will also have to sign an initial agreement that protects us from charges of kidnapping and unlawful detention.)
So we provide a much-needed service for our age, amassing heaps of good karma at the same time we get obscenely rich.
This idea’s time has come. As I read Pico Iyer’s article, I kept feeling he was on the verge of stumbling upon it himself. I await good news from prospective investors.
Any good ideas for what to call this facility, which in my mind is already becoming an international chain? Mistress Muse's No Mercy Mansion isn't quite right, though it is pretty alliterative.
Can the novel survive the demise of novelists?
The demise of the novel? This has been predicted again and again over the decades, if not the centuries, yet people keep reading novels. Here’s a recent vote of confidence in their persistence:
“The book-length text is coded in our DNA and will never go away; it is the written version of the oral myths and histories told on consecutive nights around campfires for 80,000 years. In each new generation, roughly the same percentage of people is born with this mutation: the need to be immersed in a long story told entirely through words.”
(Russell Galen, prominent New York literary agent)
Galen’s take is encouraging. But compare Booker Prize-winner Graham Swift’s even more recent remarks regarding the effects of e-books on writerly livelihoods:
“I think the tendency will be that writers will get even less than they get now for their work and sadly that could mean that some potential writers will see that they can't make a living, they will give up and the world would be poorer for the books they might have written, so in that way it is quite a serious prospect.”
Quoted in The Telegraph (17 August 2011)
Swift would seem to be saying yeah, novels are good, but you actually need novelists to produce them, and without even a whiff of financial support to keep them at it, how many books are they likely to write? Except of course, for those purest of artists who are able to live on love alone. 
Another writerly occupational hazard: starving to death.
Savage Chickens cartoon used with permission of the artist, Doug Savage.
Graham Swift's Amazon page.
English language needs *iktsuarpok*
Iktsuarpok: an Inuit word more useful to us citizens of the digital universe than umpteen expressions for varieties of snow.
Here’s how the blogsite Mental Floss characterizes the expression:
“You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet? This is the word for it.”
And it occurs to me that iktsuarpok might enrich modern English, where it could just as easily refer to obsessive checking of e-mail and Facebook to see whether anyone’s contacted you in the past 30 seconds. Even the traditional Inuit did it, eh? Social networking and our obsessive-compulsive dipping for dopamine rools.
Thanks to Rick @ RickStory for permission to use his great drawings. 
Thanks to Bill the Mathematician for sending me to Mental Floss, which cites Adam Jacot de Boinod’s book The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.
Digital technologies: The great levelers
Lonely Planet has long made everyone an adventurer, IMHO, thereby sapping much travel of any real adventure. The Discovery Channel and National Geographic, from what I hear in the street, have made nearly any experience you can imagine accessible from the comfort of your own armchair.
"So you went walking in Antarctica? (Yawn.) Whatever. I saw Antarctica on TV last week. Yeah, it was awesome. All those fuckin' penguins, eh?"
Etc.
And now Google Goggles will make anyone with the price of a smartphone a polymath, a know-it-all.
"Yo, what's that?"
"Just a sec'. Okay, yeah. Seems it's a three-dimensional shadow of a tesseract... With a ribbon on it.
“A tesseract? What the hell is a tesseract?”
“Just a sec'…"
“Whoa! Forget about tesseracts. Lookit that babe at the bar."
"Awesome."
Penguins and babes are equally awesome, as it just about anything else that impinges on one's phenomenal field, unless it's "fuckin' awesome," in which case it might be mildly interesting.
He holds his phone up so he can let Google Goggles check it out. "Uh-oh."
"What?"
"See the way the muscles between her eyes push up when she's smiling?"
"Yeah?"
"She's gaming us, my boy. A sincere smile, the muscles would be pulling down."
"Yeah?" says the other, pointing his own phone at the cutie-patootie,* snapping her photo and then consulting Google Goggles. "Check this out. Here's her Facebook page, and look here at what she says her interests are. I don't care if she's sincere or not; I want me some of that."
His friend, who is really no friend at all as you can tell by his smile, neglects to mention the medical report that's just popped up on his own phone.
Digital technology is making everyone a writer, robbing real writers of any respect for their calling or their craft. Digital technology is leaving us with fewer and fewer genuine readers; issues of relative literary quality are being drained of any force. Digital technology, together with TV, mass tourism and mass tourism guides, has trivialized travel and adventure. Digital technology, now, is giving us all the power to learn anything there is to know about everything and everyone, but we still won’t know what to do with all this information. Information is not wisdom, I am a reactionary old crock, Kindles are better reading devices than iPads, etc.
What else can I say to cheer you up this fine afternoon?
*Note. I used ‘IMHO’ earlier, which cancels ‘cutie-patootie’ in terms of my with-itness creds.
Bookish enhancements vs. publishing gimcrackery
Print books are still alive, despite continuing attempts to ruin them with digital enhancements. Digital bells and whistles are appropriate for textbooks, e.g., but, if anything, they’re destructive of works of fiction. According to this story in The Bookseller, early moves to klutzify fiction with such gimmicks as hyperlinks and video have not proven a commerical success, and are unlikely to.
In other developments, someone has found a wildly imaginative way to non-digitally enhance print reference books. Call it the guts of the matter at a glance, eh? (Interview with the artist.)
Better than ever: Surgical revision rools
1 April 2011. I'm trying to beat a self-imposed but important deadline with The Proteant Enigmass. A few people have said they'd like to see the working ms., but I'm waiting till I get to a certain point in the story so they can get a better sense of what I'm trying to do. And I'd really, really like to do that before Tuesday's operation. (As it stands, no one has seen any part of this thing, and I need to know soon how much of a fool's errand I've been on, maybe leaving enough time in this life to go back to writing something more conventional. Perhaps an account of my gradual revision and, possibly, eventual erosion by way of minor surgical procedures.
7 April 2011. I'm amazed at what modern surgery is capable of. Two days ago I had an operation for a ventral hernia, where the surgeon installed a roughly 25x20cm patch of synthetic mesh between my innermost abdominal muscles and my internal organs. He did this thing arthroscopically (laparoscopically, to be more precise), using a fiberoptic video camera, a sonic scalpel, a wee gripper on a stick, and a cross between a riveter and a staple gun to tack the patch to the muscles with spiral bits of titanium. The surgical procedure itself took about 10 minutes; another 50 minutes were spent in trying to insert the patch, which the doc said was unusually large, and which they had to keep re-rolling and trying to poke into place.
I have a brilliant CD of the internal scenes in magnificently gory color with my small intestines and some other stuff providing scenic background. Who knew these things could be such fun. (I’ve decided to deny visitors the pleasure of viewing this film, instead including a way-less dramatic image from the Web.)
I asked why they couldn’t use Mylar for the patch, thereby rendering me more invulnerable than I am to knife wounds and suchlike. If ever I give up the writing game, I may cross over into medical engineering.
Anyway, they sent me home yesterday and, today, I'm sitting quite comfortably at my computer, pretending to work. In six weeks, I’m told, I can go back to cross-his-heart-and-hope-to-die full-on living, including whatever practices it may have been that gave me the hernia in the first place.
I'm sort of hoping, though, that this is the last episode for some time to come in the ongoing saga of my surgical revision.
Qubital worlds save Pyramids from erosion by camel crap
Leary here. Wherever that might be (not to mention when).
Current affairs written on the wind (“mere ephemera,” according to my editor, which I didn’t ask). Right now, many of you folk back in 2011 will be fretting about political events in Egypt. The papers should be full of it. (You could still read newspapers back then, and they were often full of it.) No doubt the TV networks will be talking it up like they discovered Egypt only last week, and isn’t it amazing?
But that was just politics and economics and unhappy people, all of it written on the wind. Meanwhile, much more important issues were being neglected—the kind of thing that tends to evolve over many years and resists packaging as soundbites. (In fact, network news went on to nibble our world half to death, hardly noticing some other things that were about to chew up the whole shebang and swallow it, hardly leaving a crumb.)
More substantial issues. I won’t even mention China or emergent collectives or the PlagueBot. What would be the point? But here’s an Egyptian problem, one related to what was an world issue so important it made politics du jour pale by comparison. Though nearly nobody noticed (“Do you want that alliteration?” asks my editor, as though I need a machine holding my hand in this matter) because it wasn’t entertaining or dramatic enough. The Great Pyramids stood for more than 5,000 years. They may have even survived the PlagueBot, who can say? (That would be worth checking out.) Early in the 21st century, though, about 50 years ago, some people noticed the Pyramids were being eroded by piles of manure from where thousands of tourists rode camels around them, not to mention crusts of salt from where thousands more visitors sweated all over everything. (Never mind the city of Cairo had already spread out to swallow the Pyramids anyway, with highrises, traffic and air pollution also doing their bit.)
That was just one example of where mass tourism—along with urbanization, industrialization and human carelessness, not to mention plain old cussedness—having already made a mess of our natural environment, went on to destroy our cultural monuments. Rising sea levels soon made much of this problem moot, in any case. (Yeah, yeah. I know. Bad style. “Moot” interrupts the flow of my argument, since many readers will stop to savor this too-rarely used word. So says my editor, which knows many things I don’t, including whether I should worry about having many readers, never mind whether they’re going to be stopping or not.)
Qubital saviors. Then along came the generated realities. Now we had a way everyone could enjoy all the forests and pyramids anybody could handle, they didn’t even have to sweat on them if they didn’t want to. Didn’t even have to leave the comfort of their own homes. And the real items, what was left of them, would be left to recover. Except that before you knew it there wasn’t anything left of them to recover.
First we got the Troubles, then sea levels surging higher, and then the PlagueBot, which spelled an end to most of the Troubles and just about everything else as well. But what the heck.
THE PLAGUEBOT: READ ALL ABOUT IT
If you want to know something about what followed the PlagueBot—though I don’t know why anybody would, darn it, not unless they thought it was possible for me to change the past by telling you about our future which, I’m sad to say, it isn’t—you can read MOM. Find out in advance how the human race looked set to become extinct, with the machines taking over and everything. If all that’s true, of course, then how could I still be blathering away, here in the future, expecting anybody to read these chronicles? Well it’s been a near thing, I have to say, and the whole story has yet to be told.
One thing, nobody’s worried any more about who’s running the show in Egypt. There is no Egypt. In fact, countries in general are kind of passé.
So you should read MOM. (In all modesty, I have to admit that this novel draws on privileged information.) And read the next book, coming soon, the name of which Collin doesn’t want me divulging at this time.
Writerly occupational hazards: Addictions, spinal deficiencies, and disciplinary infinite regresses
One writer, however much tongue in cheek, has actually expressed admiration for addicts:
I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total surprise. ~ Chuck Palahniuk
Overall, though, even Palahniuk would probably concede that this advantage—a modicum of autonomy regarding the nature of your eventual passing (a half-assed sort of “suicide,” in plain terms)—is generally outweighed by a range of ill effects.
Traditionally, writers have too often succumbed to the temptations of drink, drugs and complicated women (or men). Among modern writers, however, the Internet threatens to become the biggest killer of creativity and real social lives. (Have a look, e.g., at Edward Tenner’s review in the Wilson Quarterly of recent books arguing two sides of the issue: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, by Clay Shirky.)
Online existence becomes ever-more seductive at the same time concern grows at what harm it might be doing us. What isn’t at issue: In this brave new digital universe we inhabit, we tend to bathe our brains in a heady punch of dopamine (see, e.g., Psychology Today) and dangerous stress-induced chemicals (seen New York Times story). Parked there in front of your computer browsing the Web and answering e-mail, you can launch yourself on a fine gonzo adventure complete with “natural” uppers and downers and hangovers, not to mention disaffected better halves and everything.
My own Internet addiction has maybe left enough of a concentration span to compose haikus:
You have mail
Delivery vehicles,
Every e-mail
A dopamine fix.
Novels, on the other hand, require more attention. Unfortunately, my various projects mean I can't go cold turkey with the Internet, but I do need to find some way of disciplining myself. Something more effective than Sara's Rx.
"Just be more disciplined," she tells me.
Right.
I recently installed a program called Freedom, which is supposed to make discipline unnecessary. And it really works—you tell it how many hours you want to be independent of the Internet, and it forbids you access to all your communication programs for exactly that long. Plead and weep as much as you like; tell Freedom that Hollywood might be trying to e-mail you right now with an offer that expires in 20 minutes. There’s nothing you can do to change its mind. No recourse. Other than to go to your other computer, where you were careful not to install Freedom. Or simply refuse to activate Freedom. You may forget for months at a time, as I have, that you even have this program that set you back $15.
Now Sara tells me, “Just be more disciplined. Force yourself to activate Freedom every morning before you start your day.”
Right. But where do I find a program that activates Freedom automatically?
Needed: iPhone “creativity meter” app
Here’s one more way modern digital technology is making our lives worse.
In times past, I’d never leave the house without a little notebook in my pocket. The plastic jacket provided handy pockets for business cards. More importantly, meanwhile, the front of the diary served as a day planner, where I’d enter appointments and other reminders from front to back as far ahead as the future boded. The back of the book was where notes for posterity went—where in idle moments I’d record snatches of dialogue, local color, names for characters, outlines for stories, books I wanted to read, books I wanted to write and so on. In months when I felt like a real writer—when I tended to look at the world through eyes that saw more and saw it in new ways—back and front would meet in a “middle” that came far nearer the beginning of the diary than the end. In months when bread-and-butter work overwhelmed the fiction writer in me, that meeting of front and back came closer to the end. An excellent measure of how cozy the Muse and I’d been lately.
Recently I was going through an old pocket diary from 1997, back in my full-on freelancing days, and I found this note towards a character:
The pocket diaries were a barometer of how creative he’d been at any given time. This particular diary was a case in point. There was almost nothing in the back, the back section the skinnier for his being utterly distracted by commercial writing jobs. (When the fiction was really cooking, on the other hand, the backs filled up a lot faster than the front.) Of course, he had earned more that month than just about any other since he'd started this game.
I was writing in the third person, but I was talking about me. (Just as with Kicking Dogs, though I was writing in the first person, I was talking about Jack Shackaway, a character who camps on my blogsite from time to time and now claims it was really him who wrote Dogs and I’m nothing but a plagiarist).
In any case, modern gadgetry has pretty well spelled an end to my home-grown creativity meter. Now I carry an iPhone and, as often as not, a notebook computer, both with calendars and PAs. I’ll still have a sturdy wee paper notebook in my bag, but it tends to fill up over a year, instead of just a few weeks, while daily reminders and seeds of deathless literary efforts alike are scattered everywhere, so there’s no telling whether I’ve been in creative mode or not.
Not unless I have some actual stories finished, of course, which hasn’t been happening often enough of late.
Digital bedlam
Yesterday I was riding the BTS here in Bangkok, when I noticed a guy standing in the corner of the car. What first caught my attention was his face, which was bathed in an unholy glow. Short of sleep as I was, my first thought was, yow, this is some kind of divine messenger, maybe sent by my dear, departed mother to have another go at finally setting me straight.
Then I realized the light came from the iPad he was holding in one hand. Whoa, I thought. This dude is right there on the leading edge, probably reading Proust at the same time he’s checking his e-mail and updating his blog.
Little did I know, because next I see he also has a live iPhone in his other hand, not to mention he’s wired to a set of headphones he maybe borrowed from a fighter pilot. No doubt he was digitally multi-tasking in ways lesser mortals such as myself couldn’t even guess at.
My point is that this vignette presents just one more harbinger of the future. Like the first time I opened the door to the loo in a local bar, probably more years ago than I want to think, and discovered one of the barmaids perched on the throne with a cell phone up against her head, this accessory so gloriously cool, back then, that it obviated any embarrassment at my intrusion. She merely sat up straighter and gave me a haughty look, never leaving off her conversation with her stockbroker in Tokyo or whatever. Yeah, and it seems like only yesterday I was boggling on the Skytrain listening to half a dozen different ringtones in concert or, even more recently, being taken aback to see otherwise apparently healthy people animatedly talking to themselves, missing a beat before I tumbled to the Bluetooth earphones. But all that’s already old hat, and has been since longer ago than yesterday. And all the signs—my radically wired Skytrain companion from yesterday, for one—point to even more radical changes on the near horizon. 
In the meantime, here’s something from our virtual friend Leary, channeling from 55 years or so in the future:
When did everything first started beeping at us? By the turn of the 21st century, for sure, you had your mobile phones, your pagers, PDAs, alarm clocks, microwave stoves, car doors, car alarms, seat belts, energy conservers, even personal computers—PCs, we called ’em. Eventually, we had gosh knows what-all squawking and beeping and driving me, for one at least, crazy. My toilet -- my toilet, mind you -- beep-beeping away, telling me my blood sugar levels were elevated.
We invented a bunch of gadgets we mostly didn’t need and then fixed it so they could nag us to death, just as though we didn’t already have mothers and wives. Everything was pay attention to this; no, pay attention to that. Wait, what about me? My phone, your phone, incoming e-mail, step clear, the train’s coming, do up your safety belt, close the door, your coffee’s ready, you need to buy more eggs, the insulin pump has run dry, slow down, your heart is racing, and why wouldn’t it be, what with all the gadgetry niggling at you and you never get a minute’s peace and quiet?
They invented beeps scientifically designed to scratch our most basic anxieties, and they came up with long-life batteries so these things would never run down. It got so the whole darned world was one big alarm system. You’d get hit by a storm of beeps, and you’d have no real idea who was supposed to be alarmed or exactly why. All you knew was that something was ready or late or about to shut down, or blow up or something. Get up! Sit down! Duck! Get that cake out of the oven; change my battery; plug me in; talk to me; call me back; cheer up, for gosh sakes… Juststandbytillyouhearanotherfriggin’beep.
On top of all that, you had the music. Some of it, you didn’t know if you were listening to the top of the pops or whether all your appliances were rioting. And those citizens who weren’t on their phones were plugged into MP3 players instead, little portable music machines, their heads leaking music when their headphones weren’t on tight. There was no escaping it. You even got song birds imitating mobile ringtones. Darn it, we had a beeping mynah in our garden down Sukhumvit Road. “Run answer the bird,” my Ellie used to tell me. (That mynah’s part of the specs even here in our virtual Bangkok, though we specified nearly every other digital beep out of existence. Gosh. Just one more way that qubital realities are making our lives better.)
“Answer the bird, dear!”
“Off the Mark” cartoon used with permission.
Man for an age
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