In Real Life
Are the machines taking over, or are we expanding the idea of humanity?
I have a friend named Barbary who is smart about things I’m not, and she has the straightforward, knowing manner of a talented woman in a male-dominated field — in her case, tech — that I appreciate. And normally I’m happy to sit there and listen to whatever she has to say because when she talks I can feel myself get smarter and more aware, but this time I had a really, really dumb question.
“What is data?”
I explained that I understood that data is recorded information in binary code, but that’s not what people talk about when they talk about data. The reason I brought it up is because another friend of mine, Peter, said one of those things that liberal arts students like me can repeat to sound smart without actually understanding it. Peter told me that data was the new internet. This sounded significant, like The. Next. Thing. But I didn’t understand it because, I came to realize, I didn’t understand what “data” meant.
Barbary, accustomed as she is to dealing with less intelligent white men but perhaps appreciating encountering one who was aware of his deficit, smiled. “First, you’ve seen people use ‘IRL’ before — in real life? You need to understand that there is no such thing as ‘in real life’ anymore. There is now IRL offline and IRL online. It’s all real life.”
Then she explained that companies were collecting information about me so they could sell things to me. Hospitals and insurance companies were collecting information about me. Social media companies tracked how I used their networks and filled in more data about me. The online version of me gets filled out when my offline self goes online to pay my offline rent. Digital Jason’s relationships come into clearer focus with every text message, group chat, and DM. “And when you hold your phone in your hand,” said Barbary, “you are holding hands with yourself.”
We read about the collection of our data almost in exclusively dystopian frames. But seen through Barbary’s lens, we are creating ourselves, mapping digital versions of our offline lives in ways that could and in fact already have dramatically increased the possibilities of what it means to be human.
In Michael Ventura’s 1985 collection of essays, Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A., he spent three pages inveighing against the “craze for playing games that can’t be won. Even with the pinball machines you can win a free game, but not with the video game. Here you play your damndest till you get killed.”
You get killed. In a video game, you die. Ventura encountered this video game early in the arcade era before a quarter could extend your life. Now, dying only leads to “respawning,” as my youngest son says on his endless games he plays late at night with his friends. They play connected to each other across town. When his best friend visits his extended family in Iran every summer, broadband access allows them to continue to the game with my son playing through the night and his friend wasting the daylight hours on the other side of the planet, forging a connection in real life while they endlessly respawn new ones.
Ventura could not see the future of online gaming in the ‘80s, much less how we would be creating digital versions of ourselves in another 30 years, so we should excuse him for not quite understanding what he saw when he passed by a Pac-Man arcade game that was being repaired. As a technician worked on the machine, Ventura got a glimpse of the circuitry inside.
The remarkable thing was that the geometrical pattern of the printed circuitry (which looks like a city’s grid from the air) was the same sort of pattern used in the visual graphics of the game!
The fractal pattern of a city’s grid is replicated in the circuitry which is then replicated in the maze of your digital avatar eating dots. Undoubtedly, the person who made this game was unconscious about this repeated pattern and was simply doing what humans do by replicating patterns found in real life. Life begins when a cell splits. We spent quarter after quarter drawing the pattern of this cell into our consciousness. We evaded the ghosts, learned the patterns, cleared the screen, and the cell split. If we died, we had more lives until we ran out. Three more lives cost 25 cents.
Steve Jobs said, “Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.” We think tech gods are all like Jobs, all-knowing, but no one really invented social networks. Mark Zuckerberg created a way to rate women online, and the community visiting the website began using that network in ways that continue to evolve. Humanity colonizes online territory, staking claims on handles and pages and digging tunnels with group chats and text chains. We’re respawning as fast as we can while we assume that the spread of online existence is part of someone’s master plan, that this world has gods, but we’re the ones coding our online selves into existence.
We’re getting used to existing online. We think nothing of owning digitized assets, everything from a music collection to literally all the money we own. We go online to find offline jobs, dates, and vacations. I’m writing this while sitting in the offline world directly into the online world so it can get to you where you will read it back in the online world. There is still this barrier. We’re still looking through Windows.
Soon, I hope, we can take the next step and occupy our online selves. I would like to sit courtside with my oldest son someday. Maybe my online self doesn’t have a bum ankle, making it possible for me to take on a hologram form to run a marathon. What if offline me had access to everything online me ever learned, not as a Google search but with the recall of a mind. Instead of laboriously incorporating online data into my offline awareness, my offline and online selves could share information seamlessly, leveling up to new ideas I could never have come up with alone. What if I became more?
Maybe someday. Right now we’re in the hand-holding stage.
What I’m reading
Holy crap! I can’t believe how quickly scooters have grown compared to ride-hailing companies. I didn’t know YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. I was unaware that U.S. cities are politically segregated even when they are racially homogenous. No one knew Pluto has an ocean, and possibly life because — get this — IT’S NOT FROZEN. Commence freaking out.
Talking to strangers is one way you can engineer good luck. Also, "Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period."
Ha, ha. Employee evaluations are anti-scientific claptrap. “Telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they should improve actually hinders learning.”
My friend Elise Hu can address the hell out of a commencement. This speech is breezy but brilliant, self-aware and subtly emotional. It’s also a liquor store robbery — in and out, no one gets hurt. Click here and scroll down to find it. (You should subscribe to her newsletter, by the way.)
No memory of why I subscribed to this feminist mom newsletter, but I sure am glad I did. Been babbling about the newsletter I got on Tuesday for a bit.
Live long enough, and you’ll see anything, including oil companies lobbying for a carbon tax (which is now a middle-of-the-road position), a huge majority of teens who say that social media makes them feel more confident and included, banning abortion polling at 8 percent, a smarter way to know where to prospect for gold, and the tech boom resulting in a homelessness crisis that the “United Nations recently deemed a human rights violation.”
Looks like Joe Biden is taking support from Kamala Harris in early primary states. The good news for Harris supporters, though, is that she is one of the top-three second choices for all the top candidates. Meanwhile, the great Dan Zak wrote about the plethora of white dudes running for president. If he wrote it, you know it’s good. He’s the Smucker’s of journalists.
OK, it’s early, yes, and most of our opinions right now are prognostications, but the data is pointing to turnout in 2020 hitting 67 percent, which would be the highest since 1916. And now 54 percent say they would “definitely” not vote to re-elect Trump. And before you say, “Yeah, but the polls were wrong in 2016,” be better.
Well, this is an interesting idea: A Homestead Act for the 21st Century. Instead of incentivizing outside investors to revitalize downtrodden areas, why not give abandoned properties to local folks willing to put in the sweat equity?
San Diego is insane about its tacos. A huge majority — like, almost every single damn one of them — think their tacos are the best. Only a little over 60 percent in Austin, Los Angeles, and San Antonio think the same of their own city’s tacos. My theory is that people in cities with better tacos know better.
How this Swedish print newspaper transitioned into digital is pretty smart, and the secret is easy to copy.
My friend David sent along this example of the best kind of logo criticism.
Search here to find out which recording artists exemplify which personality traits. For example, both Beyoncé and Eminem score very high on adventurousness and very low on trust.
If bootlegging was the inevitable result of Prohibition, then we should probably have expected this in the wake of the new abortion restrictions.
I’m surprised how well televised town halls are doing this election cycle, in particular the success of Democrats doing town halls on Fox News. Apparently a huge majority of Democrats think doing this is appropriate, and more Republicans than Democrats are against it. Only 9 percent of Democrats seem dead-set against it.
What I’m watching
Early reviews of Hulu’s Catch-22, the six-episode adaptation of Joseph Heller’s World War II satire hit on different versions of the same thought — the book was bonkers funny, but this movie isn’t. It’s actually more subtle than that, and it took me a little more than half of the episodes to figure out what they were doing. George Clooney and Coach Taylor, who play characters who inflict cruelty upon the less-powerful through bureaucratic inanities such as the titular “Catch-22,” go for laughs. Captain Yossarian and his fellow flyboys who suffer through the war, play it straight. At first the series seems to have a tone problem between the hammy Clooney and the sad-eyed Yossarian, but then you start seeing the war through the latter’s eyes, and the former looks appropriately insane. Clooney directed the last episode, and reader, it had me in tears. This is worth your time.
What I’m listening to
If you’ve ever heard Otis the Destroyer, you will get why Otis Wilkins’ new single, “Joni Mitchell Was Punk,” is such a huge (and not entirely unwelcome) departure. My friend Walker sent me this track a while back when he was producing it, and it struck me that Walker’s production style is hastening the evolution of the Austin Sound from singer/songwriter badunkadunk to a skillful combination of alternative pop with hip-hop’s loops. Listen to the Tameca Jones track, “Are you awake?”, which Walker produced, Walker’s 2018 single “Baby,” Jane Ellen Bryant’s St. Vincent-esque “Attention,” and Kady Rain’s “R.A.D. Moves.” Abhi the Nomad and Harry Edohoukwa are making very poppy hip-hop. Austin music scene has come a long way since Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel.
We get letters
For S.O.:
You continue to delight and inform, my friend. Your writing is always stellar and I appreciate your curation of things I should read.
I was particularly interested in the homesteading report and have sent it over to friends who are far more knowledgeable on equitable development than I am to get their thoughts. It's the week of graduation, though, so we'll see how interested people are in picking up a 30 page report on a Sunday morning.
I'm going to mull over the luck paper. I tend to think of myself as being just about the luckiest person, but also largely unobservant. My more-than-generous helping of privilege definitely buoys the luck, but the article seemed to be arguing for this luck being a separate co-conspirator with privilege. I'll have to mull and probably re-read.
Thank you for being your brilliant self.
From D.G.:
I noticed you like well-written music criticism and this 10 part series on the '90s was a pretty decent retrospective. They've redone the website since this was published so the pieces no longer connect sequentially and it's nearly impossible to find them all if you don't know what you're looking for...lucky for you I'm a dork and bookmarked each one separately. Enjoy.
1990 - https://music.avclub.com/part-1-1990-once-upon-a-time-i-could-love-you-1798221947
1991 - https://music.avclub.com/part-2-1991-what-s-so-civil-about-war-anyway-1798222320
1992 - https://music.avclub.com/part-3-1992-pearl-jam-the-perils-of-fame-and-the-tr-1798222434
1993 - https://music.avclub.com/part-4-1993-smashing-pumpkins-liz-phair-and-urge-ov-1798222751
1994 - https://music.avclub.com/part-5-1994-kurt-cobain-is-dead-long-live-soundgarde-1798223081
1995 - https://music.avclub.com/part-6-1995-live-bush-and-alanis-morissette-take-th-1798223405
1996 - https://music.avclub.com/part-7-1996-layne-staley-and-bradley-nowell-are-the-l-1798223643
1997 - https://music.avclub.com/part-8-1997-the-ballad-of-oasis-and-radiohead-1798223989
1998 - https://music.avclub.com/part-9-1998-you-re-either-with-korn-and-limp-bizkit-1798224287
1999 - https://music.avclub.com/part-10-1999-by-the-time-we-got-to-woodstock-99-1798224355
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