The continuous washes of connection (if not true Conversation, in the exalted sense of that word given in the Digital Minimalism gook) have a strange side effect, in me, of cementing me into reality, into the moment, into the Now, into a perceivable writing community (even if this community is like a group of higher-status high-school friends that seldom reaches out; one you have to hang around and try to hitch rides with).
The dense web of connections, you may discover if you do this experiment, is, or rather, in retrospect, was, grounding. Solidifying.
Social media also grinds your face relentlessly into the moment, into the zeitgeist, not into your personal IRL moment, but into a shared moment; again, that’s damn near Zen, so much Now, what makes this awkward is the capitalism tainted nature of the feed, and of course, our own toxic egos, our own helpless grasping after life. Social media could be like the buzzing of crickets that you tune into, and out of, as you meditate.
One question has to be, once you clear the weeds of social media, what do you plant in the garden of time? Of solitude?
Because one man’s weeds are another woman’s wildflowers.
If you are a solitary person in most ways, say, with only a few family members, who seldom speak to you, and only a few real world friends you spend time with, if you work over the web freelance, and if you are victim to melancholic nostalgia… might social media provide a kind of medication; support; crutch?
In a way, my political asides in these post reveal this machine that social media built over the last… uh… twenty years. It went full bore with mailing lists after Dubya’s brownshirts stole the election by shutting down the vote in Florida. (Very few people know that Gore won Florida in the final total recount, very narrowly, by Florida law. He earned fewer votes–but only by interpreting the intent of the voter. Not by the rules. The hanging chads, the spoiled votes, pushed Gore over the top. By modern GOP logic, he won, because those votes were spoiled. By law as well, if you care about law, Gore won. GOP hypocrisy can never be overstated.)
I just did it again.
I should delete that paragraph. Meh, I’ll do better tomorrow.
I’m drawn to the past, still, to the SF my father and I both loved. I think I loved it organically, like he did, but some part of me nervously wonders how much SF I read to have something interesting for him to talk to me about. He was loving, but distant in that very common way for fathers of that era.
I’m currently collecting (and re-collecting) a series of Ballentine Best of Collections which you can read about here:
DISCLAIMER: There are no BIPOC authors in these collections, and too few women, reflecting the bias SF publishing exhibited at that time. Yesterday I received a mass email from SF legend Steven Barnes about how he was told by SF editors as he grew up that black people simply weren’t interested in SF. How this messed him up, but didn’t stop him.
I embraced the very few BIPOC, openly GLBTQ authors we had, and read the few women. ( recall buying a stack of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed and David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself and mailing them out to my friends, something I’ve never done before or since.)
But still. I am a white het cis man of a certain age brought up on the dreams of white het cis men my father’s age, mostly, through science fiction echoing his voice. Echoing our mutual love of the future, of science and technology, of that old school optimism, before the New Wave, before the sixties crashed the SF party and the genre became more literary.
And now, in this void, I find myself trying to immerse myself in dusty paperbacks, remembering the boy who devoured novels in a single evening, who haunted used book stores, and his father’s night stand, reading, reading, reading, dreaming of this future we live in now. A dystopic version of it at any rate.
That kid slept in a room lined with glossy, Camaro Red, hand-painted bookshelves, packed with paperbacks, defined by the stories he’d assembled, blissfully unaware of the 58 year old man staring back at him in wonder.
So, I created a burst of short posts, which my blog fed into the machines I say I’m trying to get away from, and low and behold, I got twenty hits, an all time high for this series of posts.
Even a step removed, social media is pulling my fucking strings.
Because social media doesn’t want or need a thoughtful, well crafted, insightful, 1000 word thing a day from me. It wants little chunks of click baity engagement, and even if I am siphoning away traffic, the algorithms can’t help but reward me for doing what social media most wants you to do.
Touch it, poke it, think about it, ALL THE TIME.
The same is true of writing for Amazon as an indy author. Amazon indy’s can not write a good book a year and expect to get any traction. They have to write 4-12, or more, books a year, of whatever quality they can muster, and if they hit a certain level of quality, the algorithms, the marketing opportunities of that catalog, can make an indy career, an indy income, possible.
Look, there were never, ever, that many mid list authors living middle class lives writing a book or three a year, which is sorta what I wish could happen. I think, when the average human closes their eyes and thinks about writing, (and in fact, how writing is sometimes portrayed in fun movies) that is what they picture. It’s kind of like the rock group making an album a year.
Think about it. Every artist or group you love making, say, 30 or 40 things over a lifetime, maybe 10 of them great. A few things a year. You follow a few dozen creators. Get hungry? Find new artists. That’s a diet that works for everyone.
Now imagine people compelled by algorithms created to enrich billionaires, spewing mediocre content at ridiculous rates, hustling like mad to induce a kind of compulsive addiction to their brand, doing whatever it takes, like olympic athletes destroying their bodies for a few competitions.
That is what modernity, or late state capitalism, is demanding.
And they do it via the Feed.
Or maybe it was always thus. The creative life is always a hustle on the edge of poverty. Maybe my negativity bias sees dystopia in the ordinary.
So, to start off with, you’ll notice I’m juggling the day numbers on the posts because, uh, I don’t really know what day it is. I’m a freelancer with ADHD and shitty organizational habits. I am disoriented, perpetually. I’m gonna be better about it now. I can ask Alexa how many days ago was August 20, and it will tell me. Yes. I use Alexa. I am part of the problem.
In so, so many ways.
So when I rail against social media? I am not talking about you, particularly, I am talking about a collective you, but I don’t think that the individual you can ever solve the problem of the collective you.
More than half of greenhouse gases are created by industry and business practices that can only be influenced by governments or mass political movements. Your personal virtue can lessen the impact of global change, but individual virtue can’t heal the world unless they are hooked to political movements, grassroots, broad based, and finally, in some way, national and global.
If you are struggling and use Amazon, Uber, whatever problematic consumer facing entity, I don’t judge you. If voting in the marketplace with our dollars really really worked, for creating social justice, they wouldn’t let us do it. Dollars have a habit of turning into more dollars, not justice.
Yes, I know. Consumer boycotts can work, sometimes. Picket lines. But high-tech is a harder nut to crack; a recent NYT article talked about what you would have to do to get away from Amazon cloud services, who sell the basic infrastructure for a huge chunk of the net.
Basically, you can’t use the internet without feeding Amazon. Basically, only governments can break up monopolies. Well, so far. I’d be happy to be proven wrong on this.
To really detach from everything problematic you need to live in the woods and shit in the bucket. And you know, if everyone did that? The woods would die. Doesn’t work. Living in the woods and shitting in buckets isn’t going to solve our global problems.
Anyway. Deep dive there, but it’s all connected.
In short, I repeat, I do not judge you for the tech you use. Unless you’re adding smokestacks to your pickup truck or some shit like that, in which case, you’re a POS.
But I see people rushing in to tell me how, you know, THEY never fell for Facebook. These are like the people who used to tell you they didn’t own televisions, back when watching too much TV was your guilty pleasure.
Yes, we get it. You have better executive function–more willpower, as we used to say, meaning exactly the same thing, but with a less pejorative slant. Yes, your addiction is different than mine, or maybe you lack an addictive personality completely.
Or maybe you and I are defining addiction differently. Maybe that’s where the judgement, or the sensation of judgement, floats up.
I’m feeling the need to talk to people who feel themselves in the same boat as I do. The supermen and women who can use social media appropriately as authors, without it impacting their output, my hats off to you. I’m not you. Everyone comfortable with their lifetime of tech use, the shape of the life they live now with tech, again, good for you. Pointing out how you easily live without the thing I am addicted to kinda isn’t helping me.
One thing therapy has taught me, and teaches everyone I hope, is that guilt and shame spirals are shitty motivational tools. They work, sometimes, at a horrible long term cost.
Pointing out how you didn’t get addicted to something and live happily without the addiction, using the addictive thing as needed. A social drinker saying to an alcoholic that they drink two drinks a week, and use drinking socially to improve their life, and maybe network or something to get work… yeah. You get what I’m saying, right?
That’s excruciating.
But if we take two steps back, we see this is really about long term goals, that deep sense of identity or purpose. We can chat, and game, and daydream our lives away, and what’s wrong with that really? If we aren’t hurting anyone? Is the problem aspiring to be the workaholics, the joyful monomaniacs, who often end up winning every game?
That’s what I wonder about. In my heart of hearts. What if I’m happy like this, and can’t admit it to myself? What if I’m happy, only I don’t know it? Or refuse to see it? Eh?
I know. Weird, top of the Maslow’s pyramid of needs shit. That’s what we worry about, atop privilege mountain. Good problems to have. But echoes of this problem I think radiate throughout the human condition, and resonate. I think.
If not? I have nothing to say to the vast majority of humanity, which scares the crap out of me.
Published in 1955 in F&SF, Two Handed Engine uses a familiar 50s era dystopian backdrop–one Kuttner and others come back to again and again, in stories like The Midas Plague, and the Marching Morons (which would become the movie Idiocracy decades later… without any credit given) and Jack Williamsons The Humanoids. The same dystopia also forms the backstory for Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality future history.
What is this fifties era dystopia? Abundance and broadly shared prosperity.
Post War American experienced a boom, a boost in living standards that drove a lucky generation (those that survived WW2 and Korea) virtually insane. It was a perfect storm, of pro-labor decisions and government policies after WW2, combined with the being only industrial power undamaged by the war, retooling to dominate world markets for decades to come; the sole nuclear superpower for many years. With an internal market for goods and services exploding as the gains in productivity were shared with most workers.
That hasn’t happened since Ronald Reagan. It’s hard for millennials, or even Generation Jones or Gen X to even imagine.
The US experienced the greatest, fastest rise in economic growth—coupled with broadly shared prosperity—any people have ever enjoyed, again, in the history of forever.
That post WW2 generation didn’t want to hop out of their tanks and planes into shitty jobs, into near poverty. They refused to. There were strikes. Things were going to get ugly.
So the National labor Relations Board acted as a good faith arbiter between workers and management, deals were cut, even as management schools filled with middle class and working class men riding the GI bill. These executives shared the wealth with the middle class–because they were middle class. Or they’d sprung from it.
This would end in a few decades, again, by the Reagan era.
These optimistic, supremely secure creatures built the suburbs and bought super fast cars without seatbelts and smoked like chimneys and drank like fish and bought houses with big yards and snapped up generation after generation of labor saving appliances… and when they wrote science fiction?
They saw this pattern repeating itself endlessly into the future. RAH (Robert Heinlein and yes I know you hate him) called this type of story ‘If This Goes On.’ It’s fun and pretty easy to write. It speaks to the time, to the zeitgeist, but then, William Gibson told us that that’s all that SF ever does, is talk about the present. Put it under a weird kind of microscope, inflating our fears, or concerns, our misgivings.
Kuttner’s story, which re-imagines the mythical furies as robot law enforcement, is one of a genre that picks something cool, visual, mythic, or something counter-intuitive, and then struggles to construct the world where that thing makes sense. You back into the premise.
Kuttner’s world in The Two Handed Engine passes through a period of great abundance and dissipation, (free stuff for everybody coupled with the Escape Machines, some kind of VR fantasy world fulfillment that beats real life hands down) into what Cordwainer Smith would call The Rediscovering of Man in his universe–a former utopia gone wrong where work and crime is re-introduced into society.
Because it turns out humanity can’t have nice (unearned) things.
My labor theory teacher, who taught me about the boom described in the paragraphs above, had a word for this, too.
The Dignity of Labor. He did not believe in base income.
But the premise, that too much shared prosperity is the inevitable result of ever escalating productivity gains turns out not to be a problem under capitalism! That doesn’t happen. Heinlein feared it too, Bread and Circuses, the unwashed and undeserving voting themselves a too easy life, and again, doesn’t happen. Not in America at any rate. (see infant mortality, hunger, lack of access to health care, disparities in life expectancy, incarceration, etc etc etc, and if you can’t see these things don’t bother commenting, just GTFO.)
The post war boom was an aberration, a perfect storm. Fearing that entire cultures can be transformed into sociopaths because of abundance (Happens in this one) is at odds with what we now know about the hard-wired nature of this kind of mental illness, and our better natures.
Kuttner’s era, Golden Age SF, very much believed humanity to be a tabla rasa. This of course, was a step forward, from seeing us as programmed by God or the Devil or our racial ethnic background, but taken to extremes, you ended up with lots of stories like this one.
Improbably sick cultures.
Of course, we can do this story now with genetic engineering or tailored viruses or whatever. We can still do these stories. But basic income won’t turn us all into murderous sociopaths. That’s not a viable story anymore.
Some notes about the story to myself. Having not read a ton of shorts for some time I find certain narrative styles jarring, but fun and workable, and I have to remember that these kinds of stories are possible.
Spoiler alert:
In this story, third person omniscient, with a lot of internal monolog, the viewpoint character shifts, from one character to his murderer. It works perfectly.
The story starts with a giant hunk of world building exposition intoned by an omniscient narrator. Not sure we could get away with it now. But maybe, if you’re as good as Kuttner. Kuttner didn’t have to fuck around with Bruce Sterlings “The edges of ideas.” He could just tell you what the fuck happened to make the world he set his story in.
ME IN THE 90s: The internet will allow artists to detach from middlemen and distributors and outmoded and inefficient sales channels and make much, much more money from the same amount of work. This is called dis-intermediation.
ME NOW: Billionaires control my relationship with my friends and sell me the right to ‘boost’ my messages in their feeds. Stand alone content creators websites are like tar paper lemonade stands squatting beneath the overpasses of interstate highways.
Donald Trump couldn’t successfully monetize his blog without social media. He is worshipped as a God by tens of millions of people.
So I don’t know if I’ll get through this project or not. I’m still working on it, and enjoying it, but he produced a pretty big body of work, much of it short fiction, which I am only beginning to develop a taste again for as I withdraw from social media.
Why Sturgeon?
He wrote one of my favorite things, a novella my father loved too, called Baby is Three. The novelization, an extension, is to some degree is less satisfying, even though it is more complete; Baby is Three is the first act of something. But the acts you imagine coming after that set up? Glorious. The novella was published in Oct 1954 in Galaxy magazine, a year after the end of the Korean war, my father’s war.
I’d publish a story in Galaxy, (a brief revival) in the 90s…
I try to do this first act thing in my novellas; I mean, complete a major character arc for the main character… and set up something to ponder in the end. Something that lives on, where the best is yet to come. A few characters you like, earning something, winning something. A new lease on life. Powerful technology. A better future. Romantic fulfillment. A sense of meaning and purpose.
At that point? Invent as much more story as you want.
There is a Penguin / Randomhouse collection of Sturgeon’s life work, a massive thirteen volume thing curated for over a decade. I’ve read about three or four books of Sturgeon shorts at this point, maybe five, mostly shorts, mostly award winners, scattered over his 40 year writing career. He wrote shorts and novelettes and a very few novels. You could do that, in the old days, though just barely.
Sturgeon’s ISFDB page illustrates the range of his influence and staying power in the form of the hundreds of translations, collections, anthologizations, interviews and reviews of his work.
I’m not a scholar of SF, just a long time reader, old enough to remember the days when fans read some sizable fraction of the canon in one form or another. Maybe only a few books, by someone you didn’t care for, but yeah, we read a bit of everybody and a ton of whoever we really liked. It’s too big now. You’d be insane to even try.
And so much of that old stuff is so toxic to today’s readers. You can’t recommend it to anyone but historians. Sturgeon? He’s an exception.
The canon was so much smaller, before Star Wars and Star Trek. The complexion of course, very WASPy. But it was always, always, neurodivergent, as I think a lot of SF fandom is, so, the insular, clannish, tightly knit and yet fractious quality of the community was always there. Readers became writers in the span of a year or two, often, writing letters or creating and sharing review zines. Zine after zine, before zines were a cool gen-x thing.
Sturgeon is a link to my father. The novella Baby is Three is one that sent chills down my spine on first reading. Thinking of it now, I still shiver.
A third of the way through The Ultimate Egoist, the earliest collected-works Penguin collection, I am reading a fair amount of what must be fiction written for women’s magazines and /or military men / men’s adventure markets, many with no genre element. Somehow, the original publications these stories appeared in are not mentioned in the copyright pages of the texts, and I can’t find a complete list online. Not even for this respected, remembered figure…
This is infuriating.
Because magazine fiction was first absorbed in the context of the magazine, the expectations of that magazine, that genre. If you became successful enough to have single author collections of your magazine work published under your name it would be by genre. At least every Sturgeon collection I bought was all SF, spec fic, though of course, of his sort, which was always earthbound, often contemporary in feel.
Which I do too.
So Sturgeon’s SF / Fantasy work is collected; a single non-genre story is included in many collections, “And Now the News,” which is a masterpiece–but it was published, with controversy, in a science fiction magazine, the august Magazine of Fantasy & Science fiction.
I’ve sold that magazine two stories by the way. I wept when I sold the first. And howled with joy at the second…
Moving along.
But these other non-genre stories are new to me. I wish I knew where they were originally published. This was in the magazine era, and you could make living writing shorts, but of course, you had a better shot if you could write in every genre.
And it seems Sturgeon could. I’m enjoying the romances. I’m enjoying the sea stories. The military themed stories. The O’henry twist stories.
I was going to write a line about each story. I’ve read about 20 so far. Maybe I do that. Maybe I don’t. I’m gonna create a category for this project, so anyone interested in it can read the whole thing. Again, far better writers, far better scholars, have crawled around in Sturgeon’s life and work. There’s no reason to imagine I have anything important to add.
But what the hell.
I may read biographies and critical books, too. I don’t know yet. But it beats farting around on Facebook. I hope.
Sturgeon died in 1985, almost 40 years ago now. He was born fifteen years before my father… so I can imagine my teenage father reading a man not quite old enough to be his. My father is temporal my yard-stick. Dead at 67, Sturgeon had 19 years less life than my father… but my father completed his life’s work before Sturgeon’s 67. He goofed around for twenty three years with my mother after retiring from his tenured Professor gig, traveling the world, eating and drinking wine in nice restaurants.
They were both very happy. I wish my parent’s fate on us all.
But I also want to be someone who lives some mark. I’ll never approach that of Sturgeon. But maybe I can amount to something? Probably not. I write too slowly. I’m too old already. But I’ll poke around now in the life of this man who could have been my grandfather. A man of the future. A man of his time. A man who translated some good fraction of his spirit, of his being, into texts, which float through the ether, in a dozen languages, decades after his death. Moldering paperbacks. Ephemeral e-texts.
I would prefer Sturgeon’s fate to my parents. But that gives me only eight more years to do my work.
my beloved Mariposa Cafe, empty, during Delta. I can’t make myself sit inside.
There’s this weird feeling I’m having now, which isn’t terrible, but it’s lonely and odd. I’m remembering this world where I had a few good friends, and usually a romantic relationship. And my parents and my brother. And then some people from school, or work.
That was it. Oh, and the word friend didn’t have scare quotes around it.
The people from your past were gone.
If you hadn’t stayed in touch, they were just gone, and looking them up after years of ignoring each other was gonna be weird. Never was gonna happen. If you wanted to go to a high-school reunion, you went. Otherwise, never mind.
You could google stalk somebody and send them an email; you couldn’t look at pictures of their kids and look at their entire employment history.
But you did have old friends you didn’t see much anymore. Or might not see ever again. These half-life friends. These quasi friends. People who had been so important, and then, weren’t, in your day to day existence.
My parents were like that. Omnipresent, and then there, but not there, until they died a year ago. They’ve missed two yearly visits now. But they are in fact always here, boxes of ashes under my wife’s desk.
I had a lot of friends, for a time, in the 90s. We had dinner parties. Before the kids. I had a writing workshop I was very close to, with a biweekly night drinking, and a biweekly workshop.
Mistakes were made. Those relationships blew up and went away. But I had my kids. So Kids were the way we socialized. You had kid friends, kid’s parents friends, kids support group friends.
Then the kids grew up, one moved out and one is on his way. I’m a freelancer working mostly over the web. My work relationships already remote.
One thing, when you vanish from social media, and you check back, and two people checked in to see if you were dead, out of your 1000 FB friends… there’s this realization… of our essential solitude.
We don’t take up as much space in other people’s heads as we think we do. Our lives are our own.
The drone of social media fades away and you realize something is missing, in the strange quiet, and you don’t know what it is. Exactly.
Only that the silence is deafening.
I look at a picture of a girl I dated when I was in my twenties. I can see her now as a middle aged woman in a google search. I remember steaming up a car with her on a golf course in Syracuse New York. We kissed all day long. It was wonderful.
Both those two young people are as gone as the people in the boxes under my wife’s desk.
Facebook is a necklace of ghosts. For me, I think, a kind of grasping after life that isn’t really living.
I can read mail. I can look at my book sales. I can get texts. I can see if my blog gets a comment. I can log into the blog and see how many hits it has. I haven’t shut this stuff off. I can check messenger. I can look at my bank accounts and make sure nobody has stolen our identities. I can look at my retirement account and see how badly my Vegan meat stock is doing.
So that’s what I do.
Today I read I should set up do not disturb periods on the phone so my Texts can get batched up and I can treat them like emails. Good idea, I guess, but texts aren’t a huge issue for me, like they are for young people.
But the I have to punch through the block for my wife and kids and important work contacts. Just a little tech work. I show my age by admitting I have no desire to do learn how to do that. I probably should. I would like someone else to do it for me.
Bah.
The goddamn iphone counts using the ROKUs audio streaming use, ie, watching TV, as time on the phone, so, that tool is kinda useless, or hard to use, to gauge progress vis a vis the smartphone use itself, but really, I’m not working cutting back on the smart phone.
I don’t want to stop carrying a smart phone. I like, for example, knowing where the fuck I am without hunting around for a gas station with that still sells maps. I was bad at knowing where I was. I still am.
But of course, it’s all intertwined. The one thing leads to the other.
Like the alcoholic standing outside the church basement sucking down cigarettes.
One thing at a time. One day at a time.
I think I’ll check my email again.
Basically? Feel like crap. Why am I doing this again?
