The Future of America, and How to Stop It

So I was on the Chinatown bus from DC to Philly last Monday, and I was reading a book called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, by a guy named Jonathan Zittrain. It is one of those required reading tomes for most people who work in my field, and Zittrain is one of those required panelists that cycle around in what you could almost call a karmic wheel from one conference to the next – that is, could almost call a karmic wheel, were anyone ever to actually break the cycle of panelist death and rebirth, achieve nirvana, and be freed, in a blinding flash of light from behind a cloth-covered table at some convention center, the lav mic left behind dropping gamely into the empty seat.

Apparently, that has yet to happen.

The book is a great explanation of how the Internet works and what flavors it comes in; I suspect that there is going to be a really scary part about information control, commercialization, etc. later on in the book, that will spur me on to further action. But so far, I have only gotten to the fun parts, like the case of Captain Crunch. Before there were computer hackers, there were ‘phone phreakers’ – people who hacked the phone system.

This guy Captain Crunch was a man who spent years jerking at the skirts of Ma Bell, and whose greatest phreak was accomplished with a whistle found in a box of said cereal. The AT&T phone system was not digital, but analog, which means that you hacked something not with 100110010, but with actual sound. Captain Crunch discovered that these cereal-box whistles, when blown into the phone at the end of a call, signaled to the AT&T system that the line had been reset, and then was free to call anywhere in the world for free and talk as long as he wanted to.

So I was reading this book, and getting a little sleepy, and thinking about what I was going to do the next day at the Media Mobilizing Project, and maybe feeling a little bit of a smarty pants for being able to toss around this new term ‘generative network’ in some work context down the road – maybe even Tweet it in some adorable little bon mot – when I look up and see the enormous sign that says “HARLEM TURN RIGHT”. Then there’s one for BROOKLYN. Then if there’s any doubt that I am not actually in Philadelphia, there’s TRI-BOROUGH BRIDGE… and so on. And so on. It’s about 10 pm. Shit.

“Yeah uh Lauren, I don’t really think I need that place to stay tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks though. I just…overshot my destination a bit,” I say, blushing and sweating into my smartphone. “Yeah. I got on the wrong bus and I’m in New York. Yeah, I’m such a winner.” Pakistani and Chinese families exit the bus en masse, secure in their own sanity and their survival instincts, warm, pudgy, holding white plastic bags of ingredients. “Yeah. I know. Well actually you are right. It is kind of a cool thing. Yeah. Hell yeah. I’d been wanting to come up here. I don’t have to be back until the morning anyway. I’ll just wander around!”

At this point the night turned into an all-night kaleidoscope, which runs through the wasabi peas I ate in the terminal, through a bar called the Redhead which served me the oldest cocktail in America, through the Bowery Poetry Club (I had no idea they still did that in New York), through a congee restaurant (congee is like Chinese grits), then the last few hours, where, as I end up doing over and over again between the hours of 4 and 7 in the morning whenever I am in NYC, I sit on the street with homeless guys, smoke cigarettes, talk, and watch the sun come up over the city.

There are more people living on the streets of New York now than I have seen in 15 years. They are almost all black men. They are lined up on the sidewalk in the Bowery in row after row of crumpled cardboard boxes like an IKEA warehouse of human beings. (Model # ANTHRO). “It’s just the recession,” one guy said to me. Fair enough. But New York is where all our sins come out in the wash, I think. It is the Empire State, after all.

For all of the ‘social conditions’ that lead to ‘homelessness’, these mass encampments are very much a form of protest, perhaps not as political as Tent Cities, but defiant in their own way. If the city of New York – and our culture in general - is going to treat poor black men like trash, then these guys are out there on the street to confront it, parked underneath the pale hipsters laughing and scurrying by, their very presence saying yeah, if we are trash, then we are going to be here, we’re not going to let you forget it, we are going to be the wave of human trash that engulfs this city, engulfs the tourists, engulfs the financial sector until the entire island is buried under a tidal wave of human throwaways. Their very actions are a form of witness. All I can do is treat people with respect, and hear what truth they have to offer, since between 4 and 7 in New York, I am homeless too. I consider this a particularly important stop on my listening tour of the universe. No better place to really discuss healthcare reform - or the fate of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

At any rate, the guys I hung out with were way more worried about me (especially once they’d heard the story), and called me on my cell several times to make sure I got back to Pennsylvania. Survival instincts are hard to define.

The two days before, I had been in Detroit. I didn’t get to see much of it when I was there. However, I was fortunate enough to land in the tangle of leftie community organizers who are trying to cope with the massive shocks that the entire city is going through (and who had the political dirt).

I had no idea how bad it was. Detroit high schools have a 75 percent dropout rate. But from some of the problems and solutions I heard being discussed, it became clear to me that Detroit is very much a preview, a dress rehearsal of sorts, for the coming long-arc collapse of the American economy over the next 50 years. My lifetime. I don’t think I am over-exaggerating in any way to say that it will be the unique challenge of my generation to determine the nature with which we confront this coming storm – whether we remember and uphold values of community, sharing, love, and enlightenment, or if we descend into, even more than we already have, into selfishness, individuality, violence, and brutality. The immensity of this task is almost too much for me to think about, sometimes. I cannot say that I am not scared for us. But we have no choice. This is our home.

As pessimistic as this all sounds, I want to write this so I can hold up Detroit like a candle. I think there is a lot of darkness there, but I think what people are doing is kind. The spirit with which they are confronting their region’s economic cratering is to move towards their neighbors, not away from them, and it is centered on what is good in life.

If that is the epicenter, then I have hope.

Who knew? The Motor City!

NASA Releases First Images of Noctilucent Clouds

Story here.

Allied Media Conference

This weekend I was fortunate enough to go to the Allied Media Conference in Detroit.

There are a lot of conferences in this world, but I think this one is a bit different. It is probably best described as a spiritual experience packaged and arriving in the form of a conference. It is a conference where all the attendants feel - and verbalize - that their art is a form of responsibility towards one's community... folks who exhibit in their art love for the human race, via an unshakable commitment to truth. Everyone there was a teacher of some kind or another, and I was very fortunate to have learned from them. It was true generosity of spirit.

It has taken me a long time to understand that telling the truth is an act of love. For a long time, I thought that NOT telling the truth was an act of love; such are the conditions of so many families, and I think that silence is seen as something that makes the daily small brutalities of our lives supposedly easier.

I am beginning to realize that there should be no line between personal truth standards and popular media truth standards.
The media as it exists now can only be counteracted by an astonishingly brave and powerful and simply unending onslaught of truth - for every violent story they want to tell, we must tell 10 more that are human, and warm, and real. (E.g. the TV show "Nip/Tuck." - how many other stories are going to have to be told to counteract that show? "Transformers 2"? It's all massive cultural damage.)

Thankfully, it's happening. I want to talk about all of it, but right now I am tired and should sleep, and will just post something charming and funny and smart, made by a group of hypercool kids in New York City called Global Action Project.

It's the season finale of "America's Next Top Immigrant."

How to Document your Life, Part I.

“I don’t understand the impulse other people have to document their own lives so much,” I said to a friend. “It’s ridiculous. These online photo sites and all this incessant scrap-booking. Why take all that time out of actually living?”

“When you’re older, it matters,” he said. “I don’t know, but... it just becomes more important.”

Hm. Yeah. It seemed too broad of a generalization. But I’ve been thinking about it since.
Documenting one's life. How does one document one’s own life? Does one, and how, and why?

How can one have the clarity, will, and insight to curate the permanent exhibit of one’s own story? And who are the museum goers?

How much is picture … how much is sound … how much is written?

When do you let others speak about you – and is the act of choosing your character witnesses dishonest?

And isn’t it what I am doing right now?

As I write this, I am sitting outside on a deck overlooking the inlet between peninsular Florida and Clearwater Island. It is night, 78 degrees, my feet are bare, and behind me is a string of lights in the shape of multicolored beach balls. If I wanted to document this particular night, it would be difficult. It sounds simple: I went to dinner with my extended family at a seafood restaurant in St. Pete’s two days before my cousin Jennifer (a wedding planner running her own wedding) is to marry the man to whom she is already married.

There is a large underwater iceberg of passive aggression and cultural conflict going on but those are not the things to document, for me. Such things make an ugly haiku. The things I would like to take down are: Lindsay ordering coconut shrimp, Mark telling me about the healing side of the financial services industry, Josh suggesting we go to Crabby Bill’s seafood restaurant on the night when Uncle Bill was, indeed, a little crabby, and no one making a crack about it at dinner; and the crickets, now, at night.

Most of all, I think I would want to tape the sound of the crickets.

My life is so salty and Ferris wheel and grainy and it speeds back into the past so quickly, like the wake from a ship. I am actually beginning to argue with the entire idea that one should document.




There is this polished stone fossil on my desk called an ammonite, an ancient cephalopod that swam around in the ocean that covered the Sahara Desert 350 million years ago. Now its remains sit on a desk in the office of the Media and Democracy Coalition on 19th Street NW. Whenever I get too worried about some burning question such as “Is the IPhone ‘Wanker’ app going to replace the old print business model for pornography?” all I have to do is look at that little curly petrified bastard sitting on my desk. And I breathe in, and breathe out, because sharing office space with something 350 million years old has a way of putting one's woes in perspective.

In Basin and Range, John McPhee writes about the behavior and psychology of geologists. One of the most amazing things in the book is this: most of what we know about the geological history of the planet comes from the corpses of the plants and animals that died and were preserved in the various layers of the earth. Their remains have allowed us, as humans, shuffling around with our little brushes and magnifying glasses, to discover which layer of sandstone is as old as the other - they move around too much to easily count. It takes the shape of a creature to match it in time.

The other completely amazing things McPhee writes about is the attitude that geologists develop toward time. Geologists, as an effect of their profession, become almost shamanic in their attitude towards time: they transcend it, in fact. Having to think, day in and day out, week after week, in scales of hundreds of millions of years completely alters their attitude towards the importance of their own lives...towards human civilization itself, he writes.

“In some ways, talking about (deep time) makes you know that your life is a blip, nothing,” one of the geologists says.

“But in another way... it's like you live forever.”

All Philadelphians Should Have the Internet. Period.

Thank you Smithsonian, I got to see these guys

The Lesson of the Wave

I have a new place and I don’t live here yet. It has golden walls and I don’t even own a couch yet. There is too much running around and too much fighting all the time. The books are stacked up to the roof and there is not even a bookcase. I left my car in South Philly somewhere and I watch Parking Wars and pray it’s not been towed or stolen. It is not, as they say, “street legal” here, and I don’t think I consider myself that either. I am definitely not “street legal,” although I want to be, and I bought my first go-go CD yesterday.

I spent most of the Fourth of July weekend sitting on plastic chairs listening to storytellers older than myself. I am in research mode. I am reading John McPhee books so I can learn how to write about the Internet because he rocked the abstract.

I have never had to spend so much time absorbing and translating information. My friend who is one of the best writers in the movement told me it took a YEAR for him to even learn to speak coherently about the communications industry; I am at month seven, and growing mighty impatient.

I thought going to the Folklife festival would be a tonic of sorts, because I am in need of guidance right now, and it was. One thing I am learning is that your requests are answered in the most unexpected ways, and I had the most terrifying and touching moment at one of the performance spaces called ‘The Stoop’, where the great Sonia Sanchez from her perch onstage turned and looked right at me in front of 60 people and started talking to me in front of the crowd, telling me that “you have to find time to write, dear sister, you have to carry a notebook around with you, I hated that I had to work and write in my spare time but that’s how it is, I loved my work too and it was hard, and you will find your process, dear sister, on the plane or in the airport, when you go to Peru and South Africa, you will find it, and if you don’t, please come and find me.”

And it blew me away, to be so recognized, and I was speechless, because I walk around all the time with my head in a cloud of imaginary beings, places, loves, wars, characters, drained lakes, animals, newly invented games involving rubber bands, the flotsam of words from billboards, etc etc, all of the story I tell myself in order to make my day to day non-existence a trifle more exciting. This cloud is so thick that I am in constant danger of stepping off the bridge into the river and drowning one day. (Knowing too, that, if that happened, I sure would be telling myself one hell of a story.)

Plus I thought: do I really get to go to Peru and South Africa someday?

I was in Seattle for ten days and just got back Sunday. It was such an astounding adventure I am trying to keep it with me. It was a city that lay completely under the spell of the sky and the weight of the water around it and the trees (even as far as they were in the distance – great Ent trees, some of the tallest trees on the planet).

Ferries poke back and forth across the Sound, and on one of the piers there’s a tiny hut made of bark and twigs with a sign that says “Wild Woman Coffee” where womaned by a tanned blissful being with a miniature espresso machine. There is something that all that water does to you, even in June when I went – it’s sunny then. The fish might as well be swimming down the sidewalk; I think the drunks are part fish. There are certainly a lot of watering holes.

If you are sensitive enough, you can feel the layers of a city’s history emerge in its present, and in Seattle, the wild, brutal frontier town layer – the boom town layer – is still there under the software. It might well be another country entirely – a self-sustaining economy that relies in no way on the federal government but yet creates more value for the country than any other industry.

Everybody looked so outdoorsy and they offered to take me kayaking and about half the men were licensed massage therapists and the city had a pagan parade with large floats of sea animals or comical tributes to the Seattle rain, all headed up by about two hundred naked people riding bicycles in body paint.

I went to a Mariners game with friend Steve, an expatriate New Yorker and Mets fan, and he had to explain at the beginning that it was a “family-friendly” ballpark. “You notice, something’s missing here,” he said.

I looked around. I listened.

“There are no obnoxious drunk guys!” I said. “Where are they?”

I tuned my ears for the sound of insults, grunts, boos, etc., but all that was around me was a small sea of beautiful multiethnic middle school children fiddling with their IPhones, bounded by a phalanx of men in yellow ALCOHOL ENFORCEMENT t-shirts.

“This is weird,” I said. He nodded. The middle-schoolers did a giggly wave.
Ichiro did that cool Japanese-archery flourish he puts on every swing. And the Mariners won, of course.

---

I want to say something important. I have realized something about myself and my endless love-hate relationship with my own career, and I need to write it down. All the advocating I am going to do from here on out is going to be done in the spirit of enlightenment, possibility, education, freedom, hope, and love. When fighting for something, it is easy to motivate oneself by darker emotions – anger, ego, a desire to kick (fill in the blank)’s ass. But all of that is corrosive. It is not that anger cannot be a legitimate force, but it is heavy, and it weighs you down.

There was not a hint of payback in the Obama campaign – although that campaign could have been filled with it - and that is why it was so aerodynamic. It flew. It was weightless.

When one is attempting to organize a miracle – which is really what public-interest people in my field do, and I have a couple on my plate right now – the only forces that have the power to accomplish such a thing are hope and love: love for those on behalf of whom you fight, love for the future… and boundless hope, I mean boundless unfathomable hope that humanity can turn back from the cliff on which we stand teetering and find our way back to civilization and a humane world. This kind of optimism comes close to insanity, but such are the confines of our world, and such is the need to break them.

There is no room for destruction.

These are the only transformational forces on earth. It took me so long to learn this, but it’s true, especially in a job where my primary objective is to hold up the voices of silenced multitudes so that they may sing.

The world that I am helping to create is so beautiful that I simply will not get to it if there is so much as a shred of the fog of anger drifting about me. I do not know if I am going to be successful at this, but it is important that I draw this line now. I have had it with thunderstorms and destruction. From here on out it’s waves only.

The earth turns on its axis and the moon pulls and the wind shears and you get: big beautiful blue waves. Wave… wave…wave… wave. Like the sky over DC this spring – it was like the ocean itself raining down on us. People complained, and the Washington Post ran an article on Mami Wata, but nothing truly spooky happened.

And … maybe once in a while a mild tidal wave… but no one drowns. And the boats get moved a little bit up the shore, but they are fine, and maybe some friendships are formed amongst the comically and mildly angry fishermen who must of course complain but, in the end, simply cannot curse the ocean.

And the sand on the beach is purer, and the land is quenched, and there is an abundance of seafood for all.

This... now I think that this might be a way to live.