AUTONOMOUS NERVOUS SYSTEM

History of the Internet--Part 4

(Getting rather tedious, no?  I'm almost finished.  For now.)

I don't know of too many pursuits in the human endeavor where large masses of people, in the midst of their daily routines, discover a strange object and start poking it with their finger saying "I wonder what THIS does...."  MOST of us have a better sense of self-preservation in ordinary circumstances to not put ourselves in harm's way before getting a better understanding of risk and reward.

But in the bullet-proof atmosphere of the Internet, life does not play by the same rules. At least, that is the overwhelming perception that fuels the web.  I don't know of too many social situations, for example, where one walks into a room of strangers and begins talking; saying things to be agreeable, or, depending on one's need for attention--virtual or real--saying things to be disagreeable.  Most of us don't even LIKE conversation with strangers, but it is de rigueur in the world beyond Zero.  So that is exactly what happened over the past ten years. Without even considering the social consequences, hordes dove in because, in fact, there WERE NO social consequences.  At least, not immediate ones.



When MySpace opened for business, LEGIONS of fully-formed finger-pokers were ready to start publishing their own little scripted reality shows.  They had the TOOLS.  They had the Curiosity.  Perhaps even more significantly, they had the NEED.



The tools were founded on primitive platforms, rickety structures which have remained UNCHANGED since their founding.  The first was electronic mail, first called E-mail, and then SHORTENED to the snappier email.  The second was the Internet Relay Chat, irc, or chat.  Before the advent of America Online, it was all I had.



I remember once going into a bookstore and while I was browsing I started to listen to the proprietor complaining to a customer / friend that his wife was on the computer all the time.  He said that she would dash into the kitchen and make supper and dash back out, taking her dinner with her to the computer room.  He was distraught.  It was poignant, and not solely because this guy was kind of a short, stocky Elvis impersonator.  His wife and life were changing before his eyes and he had no idea what was going on.  The thing was, I could have EXPLAINED it all to him, but I did not.



What exactly would be the point of trying to tell him that the chance encounters his wife was having with those same legions who would later immigrate to MySpace but were at the present having an orgy of social intercourse they only dreamed about since high school and that, sorry Dude, but you just can't compete..... give it a few years until something even better comes along.



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I am to this day still thinking of that bookstore guy and his wife. I know it was chatrooms because she was a woman. Had it been a guy, it would have been a toss up between chatrooms and pornography, and AOL popularized both.



Here is an interesting story which I read in the Boston Globe several years ago.  And just to make sure that I was not imagining it, I searched the archives (using Google, of course) and there it was.  The story goes something like this: about 15 to 20 years ago, there were several, and I mean more than one or two, cases of commuters who marry toll booth operators.  If you don't believe me I can drag out the link to the article but that is not the point.  The point is that our cultural lifestyle was in such a state of disconnection that the daily contact of about two seconds coupled with a brief exchange of human touch was enough to engender a relationship.



Can you imagine then the tremendous APPEAL of a new way of initiating a conversation with complete strangers where, in fact, the important thing was not how you LOOKED, but what you SAID?

What a paradigm shift.



And not merely for the isolated and lonely, but also for legions like the bookstore wife who had lived their recent lives in intimate company with their spouse but suddenly saw the opportunity to, uh, open up to a complete stranger in a way not deemed..... proper by society or in a way not allowed by the rules of that particular relationship; rules that evolved over the course of their entire relationship which basically said that the time for that type of discourse was basically over because if one party or the other were to suddenly start talking in that flirty high school way it would just seem FISHY.



And speaking of fish, the whole enterprise took on the flavor of FISHING: secret spot, right selection of bait, good hook....... so that when all the conditions were right, when somebody actually acknowledged your presence online, you did indeed feel like you had just caught a big one. Conversation as sport.



That is what I could have told the bookstore guy.





End of Part 4

Late Mid-life Crisis

I had been thinking of making a career change during this economic unpleasantness until I realized that the physician I was thinking of becoming would have to listen to people complaining ALL DAY LONG.



The thought of being a scientist also briefly crossed my mind because I like research, especially now that we have Google.  Just today, I was researching human allergies for an upcoming paper I am thinking of delivering and found all kinds of distracting things instead.  Scientists are cool, but I am not so sure I look very good in those lab coats. Especially in the summer with shorts.



I have sincerely thought about being a waiter for several years now, even before I became disillusioned with my present career, mostly because I want to TRANSFORM the profession.  I want to deliver the food in the most professional way possible.  Invisibly, like those master Japanese puppeteers, all the while giving subtle statements on flavor and nutrition. Black pants.  White coat.  Towel over my arm for no practical reason.  I would never hover, never fuss.  My table would be both classroom and chapel.  But I am not so sure I could support my lavish lifestyle on tips alone.



Being a shrink would be great;  I LOVE listening to secret things.  It's what I once thought blogs might be, anonymous disclosure.  I'm afraid though that I might have a hard time refraining from editorializing with inappropriate comments.  Are you NUTS? or Let me get this straight, are you telling me you actually keep her locked in your basement? or You think YOU got problems?  And I DO have a problem with sitting still and looking attentive and I have a hard time giving advice that I don't actually believe.



Late in life I also once thought of becoming a soldier after my youth was spent decrying violence and the military-industrial complex.  The middle-aged psyche urged me to give it a try just to prove my manhood, to bond in camaraderie, drive a Jeep.  But then REAL WAR broke out for the unholiest of reasons, and Jeeps were replaced by Hummers.



I DO like washing dishes.  Most avoid them like the plague, but not me.  But the job, as a career, is held in such low esteem.  One thing about washing dishes, though: I love washing them, but nothing else.... no gathering them up, no scraping, no putting away leftovers, and NO DRYING.  Washing dishes is mindless, while all those other support activities require a bit more planning and organizing than I am capable of.  Just washing.  I am a specialist.



I could be a movie star but I don't like acting and I don't like fame and fortune.

I wonder who writes copy for spam emails.... "The life needs to be lived in the pleasure and the it will be more, the better."  I could write that, and it might be fun and rewarding.  My life NEEDS to be lived in the pleasure.



Crime boss, but I would have difficulty dealing with rival gangs.



Wrestler, but I don't have the gravelly voice.



Model.  Athlete.  Humanitarian.



When I was a kid, I took something called the Kuder Preference test.  There were questions like: Would you rather sit and read to a sick friend or go out and play?  I looked around the room..... was this a trick question?  On the basis of that test, my career was steered away from reading to sick friends.

I think I will go out to play.

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The Unabomber's Cabin

I have a very good friend who is an art historian. Let me correct that. Art History is not her day job but she DID get an art history DEGREE, from Brown University no less, and was once telling me about the purpose, the role, of art history and why it is so important, even though very few (including her) can make a living at it (a living that includes a few incidentals like a flat screen tv or a new set of golf clubs in addition to, you know, food and shelter). Until that enlightening conversation, I had just assumed that art history was for trying to place works of art into these categories like Pre-Raphaelite or Flemish Luminist, or Hudson River or what have you. Why that would be an important pursuit or not never crossed my mind..... it was like, say, DENTISTRY, something you just did. No, says my friend. The main purpose of art history is not art. Nor is it history, per se. It is actually about US, in that, in many cases, art surviving though the ages is the best narrative of the culture that there is. And because it depicts scenes of value of the time and because it managed to survive due to somebody actually caring enough to keep it safe for hundreds of years, it tells us things about the time in which it was produced that mere words cannot. And so it is with art produced even today. 

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A few years ago (about six, I think) I happened to see an art piece (one could call it an installation, except for the fact that it really wasn't installed anywhere). It sat, incongruously on the sidewalk on Mass Ave. at the front entrance to MIT. It was called, I think, the Unabomber's Cabin. For those of us with short memories, the Unabomber (not Unibomber) was a guy named Ted Kaczynski who anonymously deposited bombs to unsuspecting victims, mostly from academia, but also to airlines and computer stores. Unabomber, I read, stands for UNiversity and Airlines Bomber. (Those FBI types have a way with words, don't they?) He planted 16 bombs which killed a total of three people and injured several others. The Unabomber offered a deal: if the New York Times and the Washington Post would print his manifesto, he would cease the bombing. They did, and in a bit of irony, Ted's brother recognized the writing and turned him in.

The story is rife with sub stories, but one of the most interesting is the Unabomber's cabin. Kaczinski (once a stellar academic himself) was a hermit, living in the woods of Montana in a shack of his own construction. When Kaczynski was arrested, he was a mess, his face was almost black with grime, but the thing about the shack was that it was rather NICE. It struck a chord with the public, each of us thinking how nice it would be to have a shack in the woods where we could write our souls on paper. In addition to looking rather cozy, the cabin, in fact, had elegant proportions and a recognizable, iconic shape: Gable roof, simple plan.... if you look at a child's drawing of a house, you see the same proportions as Kaczynski's cabin, minus the flowers and brick chimney.

The sculpture at MIT named the Unabomber's Cabin had those same proportions, and although tiny as human habitation, was big and bulky on the busy Mass Ave sidewalk. There was a difference, though, and that was the sculpture-cabin was sitting on wheels. Visitors were invited to come in (the sculpture was attended), so of course, I did. There was nobody else there.... no plaques, no instructions, no labels.... just that great sense of enclosure within those well-proportioned walls and a single table on which sat a typewriter. Kaczynski used a typewriter for his manifesto and all his other correspondence with the world. The cabin was not electrified, so it was a manual typewriter, not a computer. (The FBI noted before the Unabomber was identified and captured that he made no spelling errors and no typos---can you imagine a world with no spell-check?) So in the sculpture-cabin, the single table with typewriter was almost like an altar..... majestic even.

Here is where the art comes in, though. In the typewriter was paper fed from a continuous roll, and visitors were encouraged to type on it. So I did, but in doing so, I began to see something else. Attached to the mechanism of the rolling platen of the typewriter was a long bicycle chain that went through the table and through the floor of the cabin. I asked the attendant what was going on there, but he just smiled and was silent, so I had to go back outside and look for myself. The bicycle chain was connected to a sprocket wheel under the cabin, and that wheel turned gears that turned more gears, and eventually was connected to the axle of the cabin itself! Wow. If you understand mechanics, you know that gear-reduction creates a terrific force with a very tiny amount of input force..... but the trick is you have to do the input force many many times to achieve only a fraction of the movement on the output side. Simply put, you could move this cabin with merely the motion of the typewriter roller, but to move the cabin, you would have to type a LOT.

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I think about this sculpture, about the Unabomber, about his manifesto (have you READ the thing? It might surprise you), about the state of the world, about our personal role in making it better, enfranchised, we hope, by the youthful wisdom of the newly-elected. We can move huge objects with the typing of words.

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(Post Note: I diligently searched google to identify this art work and its artist. Nothing. Did I dream it? Was it real?)

DELAYED DREAMS

I made a wrong turn and headed into Boston instead of turning onto Memorial Drive back to Harvard Square...... like a divining rod, my car knows how to show me a good time.  It drove straight to the aging male haven called the Guitar Store.

I have a son who as a toddler used to spend hours, HOURS, poring over a magazine called Nintendo Power which listed all the video games available at that time with a tiny graphic of the screen of the game in progress.  He was two.  He stood on his chair at the dining table, hunched over the magazine, scowling as he studied in the manner of a Talmud Scholar.  Over and over.  Study and study some more.

I think I inherited his genes.  I now do the same with Guitar Player Magazine looking at the latest hardware.  Over and over.  Study and study some more.  More studying than playing.  More studying than shopping.  I have four guitars, but I am in the market for a new one.  I need more.

There is a common misconception that the electric guitar is an adolescent instrument.... metal, emo, alternative, what have you.  Those grungy guys are represented there, to be sure, but the most common sight is a guy, about my age (which might be anywhere from 45-65) looking at the guitar racks, slowly scanning as though it were Nintendo Power Magazine.  And you can tell, when they finally take down a holy instrument to play (the Fender Strat is a likely choice) by the look in their eyes, they are fulfilling a dream, actually pursuing a quest, that has lain dormant since high school. 

I am pretty sure it involves a girl.

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PROFILE

It occurs to me that writing here can really be an expanded form of the dreaded Profile. Why the Profile is such an important element of any blog or social networking site is baffling. Just like I am highly suspect of any news reported by FOX, so am I suspicious of any information that shows up in the self-promoting (or self-delusional) Profile.

Still..........

For a medium whose main appeal at some level is the REMOTENESS of the writer, the social network blog demands a Profile. This is mine.

I am a guy.
I am older than you.
I am probably richer than you.
I once bought an iPod that could hold 10,000 songs but I could only think of about 200 I wanted to hear over and over again.

I sometimes dream I win marathons.
I sometimes dream I can dunk a basketball.
Usually I dream about being unable to find a working toilet.

My bicycle is older than you.
My brain is more immature than yours.
I have lost more money in the last year than my dad probably made his entire life.

My dad used to tell me about the Depression and I would just say: yeah yeah....

I am slowly losing my eyesight, which is highly inconvenient, but, I have to say, is not all that alarming.
I ride my bike to work whenever possible.

I have never been to Europe.

I vow I will never have cable tv.