Thursday, June 26, 2003

Found this and thought it worth here:

So I was stuck in the turgid grind of Seoul traffic the other day, in a cab on the way to the American Embassy. I was late and we were still a mile away and the number on the meter was just a little lower than the amount of won I had in my pocket, and that little vein at the side of my head was pulsing in tune to the stop-and-go tide of Kias and Hyundais and Ssangyongs all around.

And then an amazing thing happened. The DJ on the radio, who had been playing toothache-sweet K-pop that did nothing to lower my stress level, spoke the following clear words of English into the midst of his patter: "Sometimes feel so happy, sometimes feel so sad." I had a half-second of happy cognitive dissonance as my brain's pattern-recognition module lit up - this! here! - and then the opening chords of "Pale Blue Eyes" kicked in.

Sterling Morrison's opinion popped to mind - he hated "Pale Blue Eyes," regarding it as soppy, sentimental juvenilia ("Come on, Lou, if I wrote a song with lyrics like that I wouldn't make you play it") - but I considered it with a growing smile of disagreement. In that taxi, at that moment, that simple song came as a thoroughly unexpected irruption of grace into the mundane world: a grace capable of cindering all stresses and leaving their ash beneath consideration, something that blows away in the wind.

I found myself humbly grateful that music can still do that to me. The riot cops in front of the Embassy seemed perplexed that I stepped from the cab whistling; I wonder if any of them wondered what the tune was.

Here's the crux of it. Barring the arisal of a practical, daily-scale nanotechnic, or something as yet entirely unforeseen, the Internet is the most revolutionary, most transformative technology I shall probably know in my lifetime. In the years since 1969, and most especially since the mass popularization of the user-friendly front-end interface we know as the World Wide Web starting around 1995, Internet-based communication has wrought unprecedented (?) changes in the ways humans organize ourselves, inform ourselves, amuse and entertain ourselves, and otherwise conduct the daily business of getting by.

Some would say this simple end-to-end protocol has only accelerated a process of decentralization, of distribution, of the flattening of hierarchies that was probably already in the cards after 1968. Even so: the hierarchies have, to all appearances, been flattened. I can write these words and all fifteen-odd thousand of you can read 'em, without approval of editor, advertiser or government censorship board. 'Nuff said.

Similarly, you can release your novel, your album, your manifesto...what have you. Information wants to be free? Now it is, or something so damn close as makes no difference. It's the jubilee, or it should be.

It should be. But the world is, in just about every way that really counts, a worse place than it was in 1995. It's not just the intractable and hideous embarrassment that constitutes the present government of the United States. It's the glutted, limp global economy. It's the spreading despair, the moral squalor of local elites. It's the accelerating inequality. Above all, it's the sense that against all this, any Internet-driven diversity of expression may not count for a hill of beans in the real world.

Show me a case where e-mail or blogs or smart mobs really and unambiguously did bring down a tyrant. Show me a situation in which even one high-school bully was put in their place with the aid of this technology, let alone the pathetic tinhorn strongmen that still ru(i)n so much of this pretty sphere.

Yes, I know all about the queer-kid-in-rural-Iowa-saved-by-the-Web-lifeline, all about the adoptive-parents-finally-found-through-Web-search. I know all about the friends you've met and the community you've found and the previously-unattainable experiences you've enjoyed through the intercession of this technology - that's my story too, after all. But I mean on the macro scale. Is the planet as a whole detectably better-off in the wake of a decade of decentralized, low-cost-of-entry information availability? Are we better informed, less superstitious, more open-minded, more curious, stronger, less afraid? Do we make better choices?

I think an honest appraisal would have to conclude that the answer to all of those questions is "no." Of course, in many ways the jury is still out, and the verdict may not be fully in for a century or two (if there's anyone sentient around to hear it). And there lies the seed of my present unhappiness with technology and design: if this truly pervasive and liberating tool cannot improve the lot of our species in any lasting, meaningful sense, how much less can a new PDA, a new phone/watch/camera, a new electric scooter?

We can fill our days, down to the last double-booked minute. We can fill the places we live with objects and devices and accessories and all the manuals and packaging they come with. But we can't seem to fill the howling void that lives inside most of us.

I don't know. Show me I'm wrong. If you're reading this, write to me - most especially if you've never written me before, even more so if you've never written to any site or blog before. I want to hear your story.