Son of Apocalypse How?

[N.B., Here is the new version of this piece, which I just sent to Salon.com.]

As we head into the last year of the decade, I’ve been thinking about what they’re going to call our roll into the 21^st century. You know, those who write the history books, the pundits, the same guys who come up with lines like “Tiger is a Cheetah.” What will the era ultimately be named? 

Undoubtedly we dwell in the Information Age, a time of pervasive digitization, and that seems to offer an easy appellation. But maybe it’s more the effect this development has had on our hearts and minds that defines the tenor of the times: our stepping back from human relating and stomping toward our digital devices like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.

As we seem to become increasingly detached, I wonder about the arc of this ostensible advance. Could it signal the beginning of our impending obviation on Planet E? Is human life meant to off itself not with a grand, Jesus-strewn apocalypse, but, ironically enough, through its very own efforts at “development”?

Some say we are moving toward a time (roughly circa 2050) when human presence on Earth will be edged out, as technology rushes headlong to a point of “Singularity.” Futurist thinker Ray Kurzweil defines this era as a time when technological advances begin to unfold so rapidly that normal humans cannot keep pace and are cut out of the loop. At that point, Strong Artificial Intelligences and cybernetically augmented humans will become the dominant life forms, thus showing human history the door. Perhaps this is the backstory to Cormac McCarthy’s Road.

I can buy that eventually technology may trump biology but find it hard to believe that such a threshold could be crossed within 41 years. Then again, Kurzweil’s predictions have come to pass before, and technology evolves infinitely faster today than could have been fathomed as we flipped through our floppy discs a decade ago.

For many, digital devices and culture now consume a huge hunk of our daily bread. Just 25 years ago, few individuals could boast a computer in their homes, practically no one had cell phones, and a “hi-tech” household sported a cumbersome cable TV box and a 20-pound VCR it took an hour to convince to record one sit-com.

Today it’s a rare person who doesn’t own both computer and cell–frequently both in one–to which they’re often fanatically devoted. Some have designated these times the Attention Age, as we create and consume media and information like water, funneling it along the channels of our social media canals like gondolas through Venice.

This Brave New World seems to be riddled with paradox, however. Walt Whitman once advised, “Only connect.” And people are apparently connecting more often than ever before. With all the cell-phoning and texting and emailing and Smart Phoning, we seem to have sprouted digital umbilical cords with those closest to us. Yet this form of relatedness can feel woefully inadequate. Like fast food, it projects a semblance of nourishment. But can we be said to be deeply communicating via a text message? A tweet? A thumbs-up response to a Facebook post? At the heart of our hyper-presence lies an eerie absence, a self-perpetuating void we try to overcome by slapping our friends’ virtual backs on Facebook and sending quick texts and forwarding emails to let them know we “care.” Yet ultimately, the result can feel like drinking skim milk when we long for a rich, silky cream.

But if we are indeed moving toward absenting Mama Earth of our humanity, perhaps this is how it’s meant to be. Maybe what I might call the “Age of Detached Connection” is a step in the evolutionary progression toward the Global Android Village. Perchance this is a weaning process, and the Internet has become the transitional pacifier before we cut our cyborg milk teeth. And just maybe the Jetsonian children of tomorrow will honestly prefer a Zhu Zhu Pet to a living, breathing hamster, and we who pine for heartbeats and hamsterly élan vital will be considered hopelessly superannuated.

But it’s hard to blame them. Children have lived their whole lives with screens and keys. And with all the simulated connection in cyberspace, it’s easy for any of us to imagine we’ve got it going on. People “meet” without ever laying eyes on each other; they “talk” without ever opening their mouths; they “hang out” without ever hugging or touching or gazing into each other’s eyes. If it weren’t so life-forsaking, it would be pretty damned convenient.

Teenagers seem particularly ripe for this technological plucking. A recent NPR report noted that the number of teens pursuing driver’s licenses has decreased by millions. In the late 70s when I raced to get my license on the morning of my 17^th birthday, it was generally considered a rite of passage, as eagerly awaited as legal drinking age and high school commencement. But many kids now have such well-stocked rooms, loaded with Blu-Ray and DVD players, gaming systems, computers, musical instruments, Wii, cell phones, and iPods, that they feel little compulsion to leave, save for the dreary obligation of school. They can game online with people across the world, so that in-person friendships assume less importance, and friendly relating takes the form of a specific, targeted activity. This is quite different from my memories of getting together with other kids just to “hang around,” an amorphous term that implied a distinct lack of goal orientation. A lot of great creative projects emerged from that free-parking time.

But with its easy-to-navigate alternate reality and predictable set of responses, technology can be an irresistible Siren. Its largess of anonymity offers the opportunity to be more honest in some ways and more deceitful in others. Within its maws, each one of us gets the chance to create an entirely separate identity, an avatar that may bear little resemblance to the one we appear to have in 3-D. Added to these de facto identities are literal avatars populating such metaverses as Second Life (and its corollary, Teen Second Life), the highly nuanced virtual community that offers the options to socialize with other avatars, spend “money,” own “land,” display art, perform live music and theater, practice religion, and even have online sex. As of October 2009, more than 16 million residents had passed through Orientation Island.

Each of us citizens of cyberspace creates his or her own holograms, abstract models of what human connection looks like in screenless reality. And of course, for many, this adaptation to our timidity in social situations is great news. We have successfully engineered a series of high-tech workarounds for human discomfort within the 3-D landscape of flesh, blood, and emotion. But is creating such skewed identities really improving the scenario? The act of holograms’ colliding with holograms still can’t provide the soft nurturance and engagement of the senses that our still-human brains and bodies require to support healthy life.

Is this the time to stop and admonish, to prophesy doomsday if we don’t mend the error of our ways? Or are we bumping up against simply “what is,” based on some foregone conclusion about the fate of human life on Earth? Can individual humans have an impact, opt out of such a strong tidal wave, the Macy’s Day technological marching band? And is such a backlash even desirable, or would it serve as a roadblock in the development of consciousness? What would The Tao say about attempting to push against what feels like a river—though one so desiccated that it may be antithetical to life itself?

Perhaps our very weaknesses as human beings have flung open the door for another “life form” to enter and develop qualities that have eluded us. This calls to mind some of the classic sci-fi android films, such as A.I., Westworld, and Blade Runner, in which the drones can more readily show empathy and compassion than their human counterparts. In the heartbreaking trajectory of A.I., a young droid travels the world for more than 2,000 years, feverishly searching for the love of a mother who abandoned him. In Blade Runner, the cyborgs express the height of compassion by sparing the life of the main character, a human intent on killing them.

Have we come down with the ultimate spiritual ailment? That the human race needs to outsource our love, to create machines capable of its expression because we have so botched the job? If a machine can love better than we can, then really what is left for us to do besides strum a few chords on Guitar Hero and tweet about it? At which point, it might just be time for Armageddon to sling around a few locusts and smite us with ulcers.

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Apocalypse How?

For the last week, I’ve been mulling what might be an apt name for the last decade, our roll into 21st-century America. What will the era be dubbed in the history books? Over the last 10 years we have become increasingly digitized. So, yeah, patently we dwell in the Information Age. But I’d argue that it’s more the effect this progression has had on our hearts and minds that defines the tenor of the times. A distinct detachment, a stepping back from human relating and a greater affinity toward machine relating. Does this signal the beginning of our impending obviation on Planet E? Perhaps human life is meant to off itself not with a grand, Jesus-strewn apocalypse but, ironically enough, through its very own efforts at “development.”

Some say we are moving toward a time (roughly estimated at 2050) when human presence on the Earth will be edged out, as technology accelerates so rapidly that we will reach a point of “Singularity.” Futurist thinker Ray Kurzweil defines the Singularity as a time when technological advances begin to occur so rapidly that normal humans cannot keep pace, and are “cut out of the loop.” He posits that Strong Artificial Intelligences and cybernetically augmented humans will become the dominant life forms, essentially marking the end of human history as we know it. Perhaps this is the backstory to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I can buy that ultimately technology may trump biology but find it hard to believe that such a transition would be feasible within 41 years’ time. Then again, Kurzweil’s predictions have come to pass before, and technological development progresses infinitely faster today than could have even been fathomed a decade ago.

For most people, technology now consumes such a huge proportion of our lives. Just 25 years ago, few individuals had a computer in their homes, no one had cell phones, and household “high-tech” translated into a cumbersome cable TV box and a 20-pound VCR it took an hour to convince to record one sit-com.

Today, the techno ante has been upped, and it’s a very rare person that doesn’t own both a computer and cell phone, to which they may quite possibly be slavishly devoted. People create and consume information instantly and freely, and share it on the Web via social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and YouTube.

This Brave New World seems to be riddled with paradox, however. People are supposedly connecting more frequently than ever before. And certainly with all the cell-phoning and texting and emailing and Smart Phoning, we seem to have created digital umbilical cords with those closest to us. Yet, anyone who’s ever watched the infant-screams-while-mom-cell-phones phenomenon knows that this form of connection can feel woefully inadequate. Like fast food, it has the semblance of nourishment, but can we be said to be deeply connecting via a text message? A tweet? A thumbs-up response to a Facebook post? Within our hyper-presence there is a certain distinct absence. It’s as if we are trying to make up for the emptiness we feel by slapping our friends’ virtual backs on Facebook and sending quick texts and forwarding emails to let them know we “care,” but the end result feels like drinking skim milk when we long for a rich, silky cream.

But if we are indeed moving toward absenting Mama Earth of our humanity, perhaps this is how it’s meant to be. Perhaps what I would call the “Era of Detached Connection” is a step in the evolutionary progression toward the Global Android Village.

And with all the simulated connection occurring in cyberspace, it’s easy to get fooled. People “meet” without ever laying eyes on each other; they “talk” without ever opening their mouths; they “hang out” without ever hugging or touching or looking into each other’s eyes. Young people now use the term “talk” to mean texting, emailing, IMing, or gaming with—not anything that involves sound utterances. A friend of mine recently complained that she used to at least be able to monitor her kids’ phone conversations, but now with everything done through texting, she has no clue about even the tone of the “conversation.”

Teenagers do seem particularly ripe for this technological plucking. A recent report on NPR noted how the number of teens getting driver’s licenses has decreased by millions. In the era when I first got my license (on the very first day I was eligible), it was generally considered a rite of passage, as eagerly awaited as legal drinking age and high school commencement. But many kids now have such well-stocked rooms—filled with Blue-Ray and DVD players, gaming systems, computers, musical instruments, Wii, cell phones, iPods, etc.—that they feel little compulsion to leave, except for the dreary obligation of school. They can also play games online with people across the world, meaning that in-person friendships assume less importance. Again, it is noteworthy that their friendly relating takes the form of very targeted activity. This is quite different from my memories of friendships, when you got together with other kids just to “hang around,” and generally lacked goal orientation. As I recall, a lot of great creative projects emerged from that free-parking time.

But technology can be a slinky, seductive temptress, with its easy-to-navigate alternate reality and predictable set of responses. It affords a great deal of anonymity, which offers people a greater opportunity to be honest in certain ways and more deceitful in others. It gives users the chance to create a whole separate identity, an avatar that may bear little resemblance to the one we appear to have in 3-D. I’m speaking metaphorically, about the de facto identities we all construct as cyberspace residents. However, there are also the literal manifestations of this phenomenon in such arenas as Second Life (and its corollary, Teen Second Life), a metaverse in which one wanders a highly complex virtual world, socializes with other avatars, spends “money,” owns “land,” displays art, performs live music and theater, practices religion, and can even have online sex. As of October 2009, more than 16 million accounts were registered.

Anyone who spends time in cyberspace has essentially created holograms, abstract models of what human connection is generally believed to entail. Is this an adaptation to our inherent reticence in social situations? Are we simply engineering high-tech workarounds for human discomfort within the 3-D landscape of flesh, blood, and emotion? Is creating a skewed identity really helping the problem? Obviously, the act of holograms colliding with holograms doesn’t provide the soft nurturance and engagement of the senses that our still-human brains and bodies require to support healthy life.

Is this the time to stop and admonish, to prophesy doomsday if we don’t mend the error of our ways? Or are we bumping up against simply “what is,” based on some foregone conclusion about the fate of human life on Earth? Can individual humans have an impact, “opt out” of such a strong tidal wave—the technological march ever forward? Is such a backlash even desirable, or would it serve as a roadblock in the development of consciousness? What would The Tao say about attempting to push against what feels like a river—though one so desiccated that it is possibly antithetical to life itself?

Perhaps our very weaknesses as human beings have opened the window for another “life form” to enter and develop qualities that have eluded us. This reminds me of some of the classic sci-fi films about androids, such as A.I., Westworld, and Blade Runner, in which the androids can be more capable of showing empathy and compassion than their human counterparts. In the heartbreaking trajectory of A.I., one of my favorite films, a young android travels all over the world, in a span of more than 2,000 years, feverishly searching for the love of the mother who abandoned him. In Blade Runner, the androids express the ultimate in compassion by sparing the life of the main character, a human who is intent on killing them.

Can this be interpreted as the ultimate spiritual ailment? That the human race needs to outsource our love, to create machines capable of its expression because we have so failed at it? And does that bring a certain rightness to the notion of an Apocalyptic slate-wiping?

Communication: 1973 Versus 2009

Last night I watched Ang Lee’s film The Ice Storm for at least the fifth time. It had been awhile since I’d last seen it, and with every viewing, I’m struck by just how loaded with dead-on metaphor Rick Moody’s story is, and just how ably Lee (who was growing up in Taiwan when the film was set and from whom we cannot expect such prescience around the subtleties of American culture) has rendered it on screen. For anyone who has not seen it, The Ice Storm tells is the story of 2 neighboring families living in a tony Connecticut suburb circa 1973. This was an era in which the lid had been blown off the pot of simmering 1950s and 60s repression, marriage therapy had made it to the suburbs, and all that had previously been politely stored underground was now fizzing to the surface. This could appear quite a feat of op art to its denizens, whose M.O. had been the down low. And who would most stand in the line of fire of all this too-little, too-late awareness? The children, of course.

Looking back at this era from the vantage point of 36 years, of 3 1/2 decades of technology, psychological sophistication, the birth of the Internet, and the rise of New Media, it is striking how much these characters’ world view differs from our current time of “too much information.” If it’s a TMI world today, 1973 suburbia was definitely a world of TLI: too little information. In this landscape, couples barely communicated with one another for years on end. In one scene, a father comes home from a business trip, and after a rather bizarre conversation with his 14-year-old son, asks his wife, “Is Mikey OK? He seems a little out of it…” To which his wife responds, “Mikey’s been out of it since birth.”

Young Mikey is actually quite likely schizophrenic, or at least schizotypal. The notion that his parents would not have had a conversation about his behavior until after his 14th birthday is just one example of how these couples, and families, are so very disconnected. These days, there would have been teacher and school conferences, psychologists’ reports, extensive information available on the Internet, books, support groups, listservs, medications, playgroups, etc. It would be highly unlikely in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in the NY metro area that such a child would slip through the cracks as merely “out of it.”

And, as Moody graphically relates, the cost of such unconsciousness can be high. The boy is ultimately killed by a jolt from a telephone wire that comes crashing down during a severe ice storm. It is, of course, a metaphor for the toll exacted by the psychic ice storm of denial that surrounded him.

Yet, for all of their communication challenges, the 1970s did have a completely different, entirely more interpersonally related feeling to them. You could venture into a public place and actually have a random conversation with a stranger, as no one was preoccupied with his or her electronic device. Parents actually spoke with their children on the playground, instead of pushing them to go play so they could fidget with their Blackberrys. People spent time interacting with each other, not in the anonymizing field of cyberspace. There was simply a lot more “face time,” time when one could gaze into the eyes of another human being, which is a key ingredient of forming attachments and maintaining psychological health.

But as enjoyable as it is to wax nostalgic for the precomputer age, it is almost painful to go back and watch this chapter in The Ice Storm. It is Thanksgiving weekend, 1973. The Watergate trials have been airing all summer, Nixon has just delivered his “I am not a crook” speech, crafting a highly debatable prelude to his impeachment 7 months later. TV broadcasts are the primary means these characters have for learning about what is happening in Washington. And just one of them, a 14-year-old girl, is bright and engaged enough to even be watching; the rest have shut it out as “too much.”

Otherwise, it is a quiet world indeed. No one has yet jacked in to the matrix. There are no computers. No cell phones. No Blackberries. No texting. No emails. No blogs. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Google. And believe it or not, the son off at prep doesn’t even have a landline.

And no one is talking—certainly not about anything meaningful. In one hilarious scene, a father attempts to have a “heart-to-heart talk” to discuss sex with his 16-year-old son. He sputters through it, spouting a series of nonsequiturs and meaningless statements that do nothing but make his son squirm. Clearly these people have never talked about anything deeper than the weather. And they wonder why their kids are having problems. (Though I do have to shake his hand for even trying. Back in 1973, my own father's verbal tools of "communication" comprised 4 key phrases: "Get me the screwdriver, NOW!" "Shut the hell up," "Tell your mother to get down here," and "Stop eating--you're too fat already." The nonverbal ones were worse.)

Flash forward 36 years to our oh-so-evolved, wired-to-the-gills universe, in which research and communication tools beyond our wildest imaginings occupy huge chunks of our homes and schedules. We seem to chatter with each other night and day, with IMing, Facebook comments, Twitter notes, incessant emails, text messages, and a constant barrage of items that seem to require instant responses. Certainly the Internet has opened our eyes to so many world events, connected us with so many people who share similar interests, brought us incredible research tools and access to people all over the globe. It is, obviously, one of the most amazing pieces of technology ever invented, hands down.

However, is all the New Media actually improving our communication—or is it simply a pendulum swing in the opposite direction? Do we feel closer to humanity because we have emailed 20 people today than if we had sat down with 10 neighbors and shared a meal? Are we better able to communicate our thoughts to our partners because we have time and space to write them down, or do we alienate them because they can’t see our faces, hear our tone of voice, and watch our gestures as we speak? Do I feel more loved because 120 people have agreed to be my Facebook friends than I used to when I sat around with 15 of my buddies from college and talked over pizza? I’m not sure I do…

I think there’s a lot of quantity out there—and a lot of confusion between quantity with quality. It’s a longer topic about the whole digital age that I plan to address in the next entry. A smokescreen that can make us believe we’re getting something—but then why do we still feel like we’ve been handed a cheap shortcut? Maybe because we have.

I think it’s ultimately wonderful to possess tools and equally important to use them well—to stay connected with people in the traditional ways: through face-to-face contact whenever possible, through voice over just the written word, and through lengthier exchanges over simply a text, e-card, or other abbreviated form that we busy people try to pass off as significant, from-the-heart communication. We are still creatures that crave the tangible world. We like to touch and feel and smell and hear and engage our senses. We like to feel love--and it’s mighty hard to feel that in any depth through a computer screen. And we are fascinated by watching the human face, with all its expressions giving meaning to the words, which have been proven only 7% of a factor in overall communication. A sobering statistic, that, especially for us writers. But in the big picture, talk is cheap, and words can only say so much, despite what we in our text-heavy society may imagine.

Tonight I was reading an article on Salon.com about a woman's "addiction" to Twitter, and the letters that followed were, as usual, simply fascinating. One letter writer, whose handle was rainbirdreader, wrote, "In my 20 year career, I've seen a huge rise in the number of kids who need speech therapy and are slow to talk in recent years because their electronic toy toting parents ARE NOT TALKING TO THEM! Dull as it may be, part of parenting a young child is to talk them through their day, using our parent language to describe the people and places around them so they can eventually learn to recognize vocabulary words and start reading. The brain experts are now saying that oral vocabulary, either through conversation or stories, actually GROW KIDS BRAINS. The television doesn't register on the human brain the same way the human voice does, apparently, and kids are particularly tuned into their mother's voice...big surprise. So if you are the life of the party, start taking your children on adventures and using all the vocabulary in your vast arsenal to help them learn about their world. Believe me, you don't get that time back. I can tell by age three who has been read to and talked to by their parents because there is a light in a kids eye when they are engaged, absorbed and verbal that nothing can ever replace. Those early conversations about groceries, parks, playgrounds, cleaning, cooking, etc. are the foundation for the all the learning yet to come and teach kids HOW TO HAVE A CONVERSATION."