I must be getting old

This is a long ramble, so I've divided it up into sections, like a Kit Kat.

I

For the past week in my new, unfurnished home I’ve been living through a novel double-experiment: having no chairs, and having no internet. In order to obtain either, I’ve had to come to my new office in the university, or pay the cost of a cup of tea in a suitably equipped café. Of the two deprivations neither has been pleasant, but the latter at least has been beneficial.

The lack of convenient internet access, unlike the lack of chairs, was also premeditated. I’ve been increasingly troubled for quite a long time by the intrusion of the world into private life via the devious means of the Web. (The name of which, if you pause to consider it, does sound rather sinister, like a great space-net dropped on the Earth by a race of malevolent alien slavers in order to capture humans for their intergalactic meat farms. But I digress.)

This growing worry that our society is becoming too dependent too quickly on this new technology, coupled with my natural aversion to crowds and clubs of any sort, has led me, now that I have the free choice, to delay having broadband installed in the house. I somehow feel that it is important to wean ourselves from the tightening embrace of modern technology just as toddlers must eventually be weaned and taught to walk on their own feet. For what infant has ever written a great novel, or led an army into battle, or (Jesus Christ excepted) ever accomplished anything of note, supposing we can agree that wailing at every slight discomfort and continually soiling oneself (and others) do not rank among the noblest achievements of the human race?

In a similar way the presence of the internet in every corner of life threatens to keep us infantile: dependent, amused only by novelty, increasingly incapable of concentration and independent thought. It teaches us not to think, but to parrot and recycle, to cut and paste, to hyperlink; curiosity becomes something to be sated with the click of a mouse, not through a slow and difficult search which leads us to places we never intended or expected. I’m thinking of this now especially because in a few weeks I’ll be teaching my first batch of 18-year-old students, and I’m expected a hard fight to get them in the library reading actual books.

II

I’m too young to be a trenchant technophobe, but I’m also old enough to remember a childhood spent in the uncertain dawn of the digital age. We bought our first home computer when I was nine, I was making computer games with my friends at fifteen, and at university I first grew acquainted with the World Wide Web, like me a child of the 80s which reached maturity in the late 90s (in August 1980, as I was busy being born, Tim Berners-Lee was busy fathering his pre-WWW ENQUIRE software experiment at CERN). I got myself an email account and a mobile phone, and joined MySpace, then Facebook, as the fashion demanded, which were followed by accounts on last.fm, Spotify, XBox Live and I don’t know what else. The internet is the miraculous tool of a thousand uses, an all-pervasive, ever-adapting pocket knife, the defining technological triumph of our age, and I’ve recognised and exploited its benefits as much as anyone.

But when a tool starts to determine how we think, feel and behave, we change from being controllers to being controlled. Like all cults, the cult of technology succeeds through giving the illusion of freedom and the security of acceptance. And we are fast approaching a decisive juncture, if we have not already passed it. Witness a recent TED lecture by tech-guru Seth Priebatsch entitled ‘The Game Layer on Top of the World’, where he predicts, surely correctly, that whereas the last decade saw the steady construction of social networks which bound us ever more closely together (Facebook being the obvious winner), the coming decade will be about the exploitation of these networks through game theory - that is, through the subtle manipulation of our behaviour in ways that advertisers and social scientists have known about for years, but which Web-based social networks have allowed to become exponentially more powerful.

Priebatsch, standing on stage, is the archetypal prophet of the digital church: young, healthy, hip, with a pair of wraparound shades propped on his head, a Princeton drop-out (as he is fond of reminding us) who evidentally does not play by the rules - except of course he does play by the rules, merely a different set, the rules of game theory, which he promotes with almost creepy enthusiasm and seems to take for granted we also will follow. Judging from the mindless applause of his audience, he is quite right. And if you think you’re not already the plaything of game theorists, think again: anyone who regularly plays Farmville or uses any kind of retail loyalty card has already lost the first fight, even if they were unaware it was being fought.

III

Concerned voices have been echoing around the Web for the last few years. The other week Teknofobe (a deliberately ironic nickname, I should note) told me about Nicholas G. Carr’s new book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, which I’ve since ordered and await eagerly. As far as I can tell without having yet read it, Carr is vexed chiefly by the cognitive effect of excessive internet use on the brain, and it seems that there is some scientific evidence for the rewiring of neural pathways even among relatively light internet users. Whether the overall implications are good or bad, I have no idea. You could probably also detect the rewiring of neural pathways in people who played gin rummy for an hour a day.

My own concerns are personal and instinctive, and found some resonance in a recent essay by Hal Crowther entitled One Thousand Years of Solitude. Unlike me, Crowther is an unrepentant technophobe: he damns the growing obsession with social connectedness and talks melodramatically, but with genuine feeling, of hives, cocoons and electronic slavery, of the internet as Trojan Horse and Gorgon. His is the parting shot of a dying, bewildered breed of pre-internet writers and thinkers: ‘If you’re offended or threatened,’ he laments bitterly, ‘console yourself with the impotence and rapid extinction of my kind.’

Yet he has a point. Solitude - not just physical solitude, which is irrelevant in the age of Blackberries and Twitter, but true, unwired social solitude - is becoming rarer and more precious by the day. I can’t deny that the sci-fi nerd in me likes the idea of a hyper-connected society of ease and plenty, a futuristic utopia where everyone is linked by beneficent technology and we all skip gaily towards a horizon of Tweets and rainbows.

The anti-social loner in me, however, long ago came to loath the banality of continual Facebook updates from people I hardly know, and even from people I do, when I would not trouble them to reveal such mundane facts and observations even if they were sat two yards from me and I was in a particularly friendly mood. The critical thinker in me is repelled by the ways in which total connectedness encourages group-think, and the internet, far from encouraging independent thought amidst mutually constructive dialogue, can just as easily become an echo chamber for a thousand isolated tribes of bigots and fools. The libertarian in me fears the seductive embrace of a virtual network which is founded on data-mining technology and by necessity regards human beings as nothing more than a collection of digits to be shunted around and manipulated en masse according to the models of game theory. The leftist in me fears the fact that this technology already lies in the sweaty hands of a global plutocracy.

IV

The internet is a tool. We should no more let it determine our thoughts and actions than we would restructure our minds according to the uses of a Swiss army knife. Let us decide when we need to use it, and then use it, and then put it away, and not have it pipe itself into every room of the house every minute of every day. I confess it makes me nervous to think of a life without broadband wi-fi at home, where I have to walk 20 minutes to my office or to a wi-fi café if I want to use it. On the other hand, I spent the first twenty-seven years of my life in such impoverished circumstances, and the fact that the prospect of doing without the internet makes me so nervous is perhaps the only reason I need to go ahead. If I habituated myself to it so easily, surely I can de-habituate myself too, hopefully before it’s too late.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the potential of the internet, not least because it allows me to post such long ramblings as this to my audience of literally a dozen or so readers (few in number, but treasured, except for Vlad, who represents the most devious and spiteful depths of the internet community, and everything that is wrong with the modern world). Yet as much as I love the potential of the internet, I also love the potential of a printed book to encourage deep reading and slow, active engagement in what I read without fear of distraction. For that matter, I love the potential of a bottle opener to open bottles, but I don’t keep it always in my pocket. If I did, it would be indicative of a serious addictive problem. And there’s the crux of it, and the reason why I shall try to continue to deprive my home of the internet.

Although I will eventually buy some chairs.

Killing two turds with one stone

Now there isn't much that Vlad and I agree on, but there are two things which have exercised our combined ire recently.

1) The existence of Avatar fans.

I don't mean people who saw the film and thought it was okay, who were impressed by the effects but not much else. I mean the hardcore fanbase which has sprung up in the last couple of months and is spreading on the internet like bubonic plague. Unsympathetic souls have christened them "Avatards".

First of all, this review explains why the film is overrated, dull and manipulative.

Yet it's just the sort of thing that seems to suck people in. Using a highly scientific method of measuring internet opinion, I typed "avatar is shit" into Google. It got 24 million hits. If I type "avatar is awesome", it gets twice as many. That can't be right.

There are Avatar forums devoted to dealing with post-Avatar depression - for people who are depressed, I should add, not because they just paid good money to put on some silly glasses and be bored for two hours, but because after being sucked into Cameron's cliched and preachy utopian fairytale they find themselves unable to deal with the imperfections of the real world.

And while the film has its share of normal fans, there are some who regard it as a life-changing experience, a call to arms for social and political revolution. It's basically provoked a crude form of environmental activism for people with short attention spans and a penchant for blue faces.

Personally I don't see how the derivative "alien" culture of the Na'vi (another pet hate: arbitrary use of apostrophes in alien or fantasy names) can inspire anyone but the most feeble minded. Honestly. It's a hokey mush of noble savage clichés and a language that any skilled linguist could bash out over a weekend.

Worst of all, now my toes curl in embarrassment every time I hear someone use the phrase "I see you". Thanks, Cameron. You've spawned another generation of confused sci-fi nerds whose idea of personal fulfilment is to waste their time learning to live a pretend culture and language, as though Star Trek didn't already fulfil that need. Tolkien, as a professional philologist, constructed his fantasy languages for his own half-secret personal enjoyment. He never expected that anyone would take the trouble to learn them.

2) U2, especially Bono

Vlad has already covered Bono's latest insult to humanity, i.e. his continued existence. U2's 2009 tour helped the band reap over $100m last year and involved perhaps the largest physical expression of arrogance ever made by any rock band, including U2.

Compensating for something, Bono?

One would think that a band which was able to impress people with its musical skill wouldn't need to resort to stuff like this. What's Bono going to do next, rebuild the Pyramid of Cheops on the banks of the Liffey as his burial tomb?

I gladly concede that U2 has had some good moments. Sunday Bloody Sunday is a decent protest song, and I think With Or Without You is a beautiful ballad. But they've produced no more than you'd expect for a band which has lasted three times longer than Napoleon's empire and produced a dozen more full-length albums than he managed. As the saying goes, you throw enough shit against the wall, some of it's gonna stick.

The best you can say about them is that they haven't got any worse in the last thirty years, but that's mostly because they haven't developed at all. There's a simple test. Listen to their 1980 debut album Boy, and then listen to 2009's No Line On The Horizon, and try to identify any meaningful progression apart from the increased pretension of the title. The same echoey guitar riffs, the same warbling vocals, the same vacuous lyrics.

Being unable to expand into new creative areas in all that time, apart from regular forays into whatever they judged to be cool at the time (pacifism and Americana in the 80s, techno in the 90s, themselves in the 2000s), must be indicative of a serious lack of talent. But then U2 has always been mostly about impressing people. They are like the golden boy who is a little too eager to prove himself to his parents because he knows, deep down, that he isn't really all that golden.

For an example of a band which has developed ten times as much as U2 in half the time, you could do worse than listen to the back catalogue of Wilco. Jeff Tweedy doesn't need massive robot crabs to impress people.

Rotherham Revisited

As I'm still out of sorts and have no more to tell of Vienna than that which I observe while prone upon my floor, I have recovered and reposted an old blog entry from 16 December 2006, in part because Vlad, in a commendable effort to save as many people as possible from the pain of experiencing Rotherham at first hand, is presently leading an online tour of his home town.

*

They order, said I, this matter better in Rotherham--You have been to Rotherham? quoth my manservant, turning quick upon me with the most civil triumph in the world.

Of course I struck the bounder soundly across his chin with my cane for his impudence, & as his unconscious form crumpled to the floor like a discarded pair of breeches, I thought to myself, Well, surely t'would be a fine thing to visit the place, tho' it be some hours distant--& despite the clouds of foulness which I saw daily at the southern end of Precentor's Court, above the pigeon-coop of the Dean's town house, disgorg'd, no doubt, by the unfortunate burg itself--One ought, I mused further, bear a stout mind in the face of such evil.

So in a matter of minutes I had embark'd by steam-locomotive with two gentlemen friends of mine, worthy fellows & solid companions. Is it, quoth Mr. McKibbin, one of the pair, the case that in Rotherham the sun is render'd quite invisible to the human eye?--Nay, replied Mr. Wilson, Esq., the third of our number, 'Tis not so--for when t'were, t'would be that denizens of Rotherham would be as pasty & wan as geese; &, as is quite often observ'd, they are known abroad by their ruddy & sun-burned complexion. Aye, said Mr. McKibbin, but 'tis also true, Sir--as I have often observ'd of my own labourers--that the wind can render one's face most rough & uncouth without the aid of the sun. To which answer'd Mr. Wilson, Esq., It is so; perhaps one best recognizes a Rotherhamite by his uncouth gait and shifting eyes.

With such banter did we pass the journey; I--for the most part—watched the green fields slowly give way to great mountains of ash, piles of rusty, long-dead industry & endless stretches of ruin'd abodes, such as one imagines are inhabited by the sorry spectres of Hell itself.

Upon arrival in Rotherham we were approach'd by a crudely-featured, dwarf-like creature which introduced itself as Alexander, & promised us an insightful & illuminating tour of the town, should we deign him worthy of a half-shilling; which--following some conference-being agreed, we took the sorry fellow into our service.

Our guide first led us to the market of the town, where he said--& though to render his gutteral speech into English would be an offense to that noble tongue, I shall capture the tone & temper of his words as best I can--In t'olden days, t'market were t'bigger than t'day; an' all t'folk used to come righ' longways to barter and sell t'wares; ee by gum, them were t'days; now us folks mostly come 'ere to kick us faces in an' take smack be'ind t'fish counter.

Our guide's informations had left poor Mr. McKibbin in a state of some distress & confusion, worsen'd, indeed, by his severe aversion to crowds & to common people in general; we thus hasten'd our guide & left said place of barter.

Whereupon we saw the Rotherham Central Library & Arts Centre, the most accomplish'd architecture of the town by common account; -By my word, said Mr. Wilson, Esq., looking over the edifice with dubious eye, Why, 'tis the very image of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice; do you not agree, Mr. McKibbin? -Why--said the other, having recover'd from his previous disposition--I do believe you are right; one would scarcely imagine that such a treaure could be hidden away in so secluded and hostile a place.

Having cast due appreciation upon the stately dwelling-place of the Muses, our surly guide led us atop a small hill, where we entered a museum devoted to curiosities & antiquities; I have precious little stomach for such distractions, being of a naturally delicate and refin'd nature; & so it was with some horror that mine eyes fell upon a glass case containing a six-legged feline; in retreat, I blunder'd into a large bear--tied to a post, I saw with no little relief--& narrowly avoided its gaping maw and claws, of no mean size. Mr. Wilson, Esq., showing remarkable fortitude--no doubt acquired during his many years as a bear-trainer on the Russian Steppes--stood beside the beast & treated it with such gentleness as t'were a yapping mongrel or starling.

At once the poor creature shut its jaw and bow'd its great head with remarkable grace. I can't get out, declared the bear, - I can't get out, straining at its chains; - God help thee! said Mr. Wilson, Esq., But I'll let thee out, cost what it will; & with that he set about pulling apart the chains which were denying the gentle creature its liberty. In an instant they were broken; the beast, with a great roar, lumber'd from the room towards freedom; which affectionate sight was follow'd almost at once by screams of delight & surprise from Liberty's citizens.

We betook ourselves from the scene with some pleasure, not wishing to trespass on the happiness of others; -Our work here is done, quoth Mr. Wilson, Esq., to which I laughed in agreement, & Mr. McKibbin likewise.

There was little else with which to occupy ourselves once we had traversed the Market, admired the Library & set a bear at liberty; -Fare well, stout Guide, said I once we had return'd to the station, & furnish'd our loyal companion with a half-shilling.

-Nay, said Mr. McKibbin, but look you upon him; why, by his very visage and posture one sees the wicked mockery of Nature, the belly of misfortune, so to speak, whence comes little but s-, if you will forgive my crudity; pray grace the fellow's palm with another half-shilling, for he has served us dutifully & will no doubt suffer for the want of it within a fortnight.

-Give him not a farthing! declared Mr. Wilson, Esq., hitting our guide with some force about the temple. -The fellow is surly & unpleasant to gaze at, &, as you know--& know we did--life has little to recommend it but what Beauty offers; & this fellow offers nothing, but indeed taketh away, as is oftentimes said of the Devil himself. Go therefore! cried Mr. Wilson, Esq., to our unfortunate sometime servant, -Go, take your penny, & spend it on vice you neither deserve nor can afford; else--by G-!--I shall dash your brains upon the pavement with my billy-club.

Our guide fled in much distress, clutching his precious half-shilling; & with a tear I saw him depart, for I consider'd him a fellow most hard done by in the world--But such compassion is a weakness of mine, gentle reader; for well I know that the poor & ignorant are to punish'd in their faults, not encourag'd in them; -And though both I & Mr. McKibbin were for a short time out of temper with Mr. Wilson, Esq., for his brusqueness of manner, he was soon forgiven; & with light hearts we boarded the train & bade Rotherham a lusty adieu!