Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  It’s heaven.

  To enter, you pass through a Scrooge McDuck–like bank vault door and walk onto a steel mesh surface that has you floating in the exact mathematical centre of the room. It’s as if you’ve entered a genuinely magic space where normal rules of sound no longer apply. Inside the room, a Bell Labs staffer popped a balloon in my face and it made no noise. That’s because what we normally call a balloon pop is what is technically called a “sonic skeleton.” No sonic skeletons here.

  In December 1988 I was walking to catch a streetcar on a snowy Toronto morning, and thirty seconds out of the house, I had a catastrophic sneeze. Looking at my Kleenex I saw an object the same size, shape and colour of a green Thompson seedless grape—except it had veins and something that looked like an umbilical cord. I took it directly to my doctor, who said, “Well, at least it’s not inside you anymore.” He had a point. But ever since that day, I’ve been unable to sleep without earplugs, and also on that day I lost my ability to “focus” sound. Up to then I was merely hypersensitive to noise but—I don’t know what exactly happened—with that grape went what was otherwise somewhat normal hearing. Since then, a noise on one side of my head will cancel out a noise coming in from the other side. There’s nothing I can now do about this; it’s my brain. It’s like being able to see but nothing is actually ever clear. So I avoid spaces where sound comes from all directions. Concerts are fine because the music blasts from the stage. Fundraising dinners in large rooms are a blur, so I don’t go to them. Art openings and the like I also try to avoid: concrete walls and glass and the sound of five hundred quacking ducks—there’s no point.

  I think about noise more than most people simply because it all goes directly into my fight-or-flight brain nodule and wrecks much of life’s options. But it also makes me realize that people with normal hearing still put up with far more noise than they actually need to. In many public spaces, all one has to do is click one’s heels together three times and say, “I no longer want this noise.”

  Example?

  Gyms.

  Gyms are the worst: mirrors, hard floors, clanging metal, and music seemingly always ferociously controlled by a twenty-three-year-old girl named Hayley. Ask anyone in a gym to lower the volume and you might as well ask your dog its opinion on Russia.

  Airport lounges are the second worst. Oh look—is that a TV screen? Well then we’d better blast out the sound because that way people will know the TV is turned on. It’s so sad: all of these people seeking refuge during a weary travel day, and they get CNN at full volume. Asking staff to turn it down is pointless. They simply make “that face,” and if you push it, you end up on the no-fly list.

  And then restaurants. A really good one opened up down the street from me. Great food and a great owner—but all glass mirrors and ceramic tile. Inside, it sounds like cutlery being shaken in a soup pot. Bonus: music controlled by a twenty-three-year-old staffer (I asked). People remember these things even if they don’t realize it.

  “Want to go to that new place down the street again?”

  “Hmmm…no. Let’s try somewhere else.”

  And then there’s leaf blowers. No, let’s not start.

  Church bells were the Internet of the 1500s, but churches didn’t play them twenty-four hours a day. Back then they knew that as a species we’re not cut out for endless noise from endless sources, yet in the past century I think we’ve maybe tricked ourselves into thinking we are. There’s a message from those bells or, rather, the absence of a message.

  iF-iW eerF

  Last month I stayed in two über-trendy hotels, one in Berlin, one in London. What sticks out in my mind about both hotels is their lobbies, restaurants and coffee areas: every single chair, every ledge, every flat surface had been colonized by well-nourished-looking twenty-eight-and-a-half-year-olds gazing into open laptops, buds in their ears, and a phone or tablet to the side. The only exceptions were obviously agitated twenty-eight-and-a-half-year-old men and women standing in the lobby, obviously awaiting a (cough, cough) Tinder or Grindr hookup.

  And nobody was talking to anyone.

  The only sound was the tippy-tap of MacBook Pro keys editing a sound file or sorting out photo files. Was this kind of creepy? Yes. Yes, it was. Spooky too. And then I got over the spookiness and began to see the room before me as a gentleman’s club in 1900, with everyone reading newspapers in total silence—this is just the twenty-first-century version, except this one contains women and some sense of limitlessness. And then I got to thinking that these twenty-eight-year-olds could have been upstairs in their rooms with their laptops, doing what they were doing, except they chose to be downstairs among their own kind, finding warmth in numbers. It made me feel good about people wanting to be with people, albeit dressed up slightly on the hot side…But then, one never knows when Tinder or Grindr might buzz.

  Last week Marriott International Inc. was fined US$600,000 after someone alerted the FCC that the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville had a device that blocked conventioneers from setting up their own Wi-Fi hot spots, forcing them to instead use the Marriott’s extortionately expensive Wi-Fi service, US$250 to $1,000 per device. Marriott’s excuse? They were protecting guests from “rogue wireless hot spots that can cause degraded service, insidious cyber-attacks and identity theft.” Oddly, Marriott still publicly puts forth the notion that they committed no wrong, fine notwithstanding [insert gales of laughter here].

  I don’t turn on the TV set in a hotel room anymore, nor do I use the phone. This wasn’t a conscious decision; it just sort of dawned on me recently, and I think I’m in the majority. Everything runs through my laptop or iPhone: free long-distance calls on Gmail and all the movies and TV you care to bring or stream. I suppose hotels are either very happy about this—maybe phones and TV movies were a pain in the butt—or, more likely, they’re very annoyed at losing a revenue golden goose. One hotel in Los Angeles charged me five dollars a minute to phone Canada. When I asked about it, they said, “Oh, but sir, Canada’s a foreign country.”

  I live in Vancouver and I get about ten megs a second of Internet upload speed courtesy of my provider. This is pathetic, but comparing it to most North American providers, I should count my blessings. Decades of ruthless market competition—Darwinian capitalism at its most intense—has led to an Internet speed crisis so severe that critics have likened it to a human rights violation. It seems that carrying broadband is the one form of business that is stunted, if not entirely crippled, when placed in the hands of the free market. Ask anyone in telephony and they’ll confirm that pretty much all wireless providers hate each other’s guts—yet at the same time, with a bit of deft probing, you can also get them to confirm that Verizon is doing a Grindr hookup with Comcast, which is doing a Tinder hookup with Time Warner, which is probably hooking up with whoever it is that links you to the outer world. It’s not hard to imagine collusive pillow talk about keeping speeds as low as possible while simultaneously brainwashing consumers into thinking they’re getting the best service possible—and that they ought to be grateful for it. And we all know that roaming charges are probably the biggest single money-suck in modern history.

  China’s recent five-year plan is to provide ultra-high-speed connectivity to every single Chinese citizen: one gig per second in the major cities, two hundred megs in smaller cities, and five megs in remote valleys. And because it’s China, you know it’s going to happen. Their logic? The future of humanity in this century is ultra-high-speed broadband, everywhere, always. It is inevitable, and if it’s inevitable, China may as well get there first—although how they will censor this sort of Internet traffic is going to be very interesting. In my mind, China’s high-speed experiment is going to end either like Thelma & Louise, with the car driving off the cliff, or like Grease, with Sandy and Danny’s car flying up to heaven. But at least China’s going for it.

  Good Wi-Fi is good business. High-speed Internet keeps your country from being second-rate. Overch
arging for speed—or crippling speed under the aegis of pseudo-capitalism—is simply stupid. People remember when their hotel charges $13.95 for one day’s Internet usage. They know they’re being fleeced every time they log on to their home system. Improving wireless speed can happen only if we start ignoring the quacking duck noises of frenemy wireless providers and seek political impetus for a broader vision of wireless. Demand the inevitable.

  Stuffed

  One of comedian George Carlin’s (1937–2008) seminal monologues was his 1986 riff on stuff: “That’s all the meaning of life is: trying to find a place to put your stuff.” “That’s all your house is, is a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” And to paraphrase: “Someone else’s stuff is actually shit, whereas your own shit isn’t shit at all; it’s stuff.” I’m made aware of this every time family members visit my house and see the art I collect. I see Carlin’s very words etched onto their retinas, and I can imagine the conversations they’re having in the car driving away: “Do you think maybe all that art stuff he collects is a cry for help?”

  “That art stuff of his? It’s not stuff; it’s shit.”

  “But it’s art shit. I think it might be worth something. It’s the art world. They have no rules. They can turn a piece of air into a million dollars if they want to.”

  “So, maybe it’s not shit after all.”

  “Nah. Let’s not get too cosmic. It’s shit. Art shit.”

  Ahhh, families.

  In the past I’ve written about links between hoarding and collecting, recoding art-collecting and art-fair behaviour as possibly subdued forms of hoarding. Basically: Where does collecting end and hoarding begin? One thing the piece didn’t ask was, what are the clinical roots of obsessive hoarding (which is now a recognized condition in the DSM-5)? One thing psychologists agree on is that hoarding is grounded in deep loss. First there needs to be a pre-existing hoarding proclivity (not uncommon with our hunter-gatherer heritage). If someone with a proclivity experiences a quick and catastrophic loss—often the death of a close relative, frequently in car accidents—one need wait approximately eighteen to twenty-four months before hoarding kicks in. TV reality shows on hoarding (A&E’s Hoarders; TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive) would have us believe that given dozens of helpers and a trained therapist, hoarders are often cured by a TV episode’s end. The truth, though, is that there’s really no cure for hoarding. Once it’s there, it’s pretty much there to stay.

  On these same TV shows, a voice-over regularly tells us that hoarding behaviour is unsanitary and unsafe, and that is correct. A few years back a family friend—a big-game taxidermist who ended up making more money renting out mounted animals to TV and film shoots than he did with his trade—was killed in an electrical fire that began in his basement. He ran into his basement to try to put it out, got trapped and quickly died of smoke inhalation. His retail storefront had always been immensely dense with hides and heads and antlers. Nobody was surprised to learn that his house had been equally as dense, but it was odd to think of his pack-ratting as being possibly a medical condition.

  One of the borderline ghoulish best parts of watching TV hoarding shows is watching the expressions on the faces of hoarders once they realize that the intervention is for real. Your relatives are everywhere, poking out from behind mounds of pizza boxes and mildewed second-hand Raggedy Ann dolls. There’s a huge empty blue skiff in the driveway, waiting to feast on all of your stuff, and it’s surrounded by a dozen gym-toned refuse movers. There’s a blond woman who looks like J.K. Rowling (1965–) asking you how you feel about an oil-stained Velveeta box whose contents you ate on the morning the Challenger exploded.

  “This is actually happening to me—everyone is watching me.”

  Until then it’s usually quite friendly, and in some cases hours can pass, and some deaccessioning progress is made, but then comes something—usually something utterly useless (a Jif peanut butter jar, circa 1988, empty but not cleaned or rinsed)—and the hoarder chokes. It’s in the eyes: (a) I may need that jar at some point down the road, and (b) this intervention is over. From there it’s only a matter of how much of a meltdown it’s going to be, and how ornery the hoarder needs to be to eject everyone from his or her house.

  Needless to say, one feels a tingle of superiority knowing that one would never ever have one’s inner life come to a grinding halt over throwing out a twenty-seven-year-old unrinsed jar of peanut butter. But if it wasn’t that Jif jar, what would it be that would make someone—you—choke? Losing the nineteenth-century rocking chair? That small David Salle (1952–) canvas? And wait—how did a Jif jar ever become the shorthand for life and its losses? Is that what the Brillo boxes were all about? How does a Christie’s evening postwar contemporary art sale become a magic-wanding spectacle where, instead of peanut butter jars, bits of wood and paint are converted from shit into stuff? How do objects triumph and become surrogates for life?

  I think it was Bruno Bischofberger (1940–) who said that the problem with the way Andy Warhol (1928–1987) collected art was that he always went for lots of medium-good stuff instead of getting the one or two truly good works. Warhol (the hoarder’s hoarder) would probably have agreed, but I doubt this insight would have affected his accumulating strategies.

  A publisher I worked with in the 1990s had a living room wall twelve-deep with Gerhard Richter (1932–) canvases. God knows how many he has now, but however many it is, it will never be enough.

  A few years back I visited a friend of a friend in Portland with a pretty amazing collection of post-1960 American work. He went to the kitchen, and when he came back he saw me staring into the centre of a really good crushed John Chamberlain (1927–2011).

  “What are you staring at?”

  “The dust.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Inside this piece. There’s no dust on the outside bits, but it’s really thick in the middle.”

  He looked. “I think that’s as far in as the housekeeper’s arms can reach.”

  “Your housekeeper Windexes your art?”

  I saw his face collapse. Later I believe the piece was professionally cleaned with carbon tetrachloride dry-cleaning solution at immense cost. It reminded me of reading about Leo Castelli (1907–1999), who wasn’t allowed to have regular housekeeping staff in his apartment. In order to keep his insurance, he had to have MFA students work as his housekeepers. I wonder if they’re now making MFA Roombas.

  I think it’s perhaps also important to note that most curators almost never collect anything—yes, all those magazine spreads with the large, empty white apartments—and if you ever ask a minimalist curator what they collect, they often make that pained face that is actually quite similar to the Jif jar lover’s at the moment of possible surrender. “But you don’t understand; I have no choice in this matter. You merely see an empty apartment, but for me this apartment is full of nothingness. That’s correct: I hoard space.” A friend of mine is a manufacturer and seller of modernist furniture. Five years ago he built a new showroom, and he was so in love with how empty it was, he kept it unused for a year as a private meditation space.

  Most writers I’ve met, when they’re in the first half of their novel, stop reading other writers’ books because it’s so easy for someone else’s style to osmotically leak into your own, especially during a novel’s embryonic phase. I wonder if that’s why curators are so commonly minimalists—there’s nothing to leak into their brains and sway their point of view, which is perhaps how they maintain a supernatural power to be part of the process that turns air into millions of dollars.

  On the other hand, most art dealers are deeply into all forms of collecting, as if our world is just a perpetual Wild West of shopping. I once visited a collector specializing in nineteenth-century West Coast North American works who had an almost parodically dull house at what he called “street level” in a suburb. But beneath his boring tract home were, at the very least, thousands of works arranged as though in a natural history museum.r />
  Designer Jonathan Adler (1966–) says your house should be an antidepressant. I agree. And so does the art world. When curators come home and find nothingness, they get a minimalist high. When dealers come home and find five Ellsworth Kellys leaning against a wall, they’re also high in much the same way. Wikipedia tells us, “Hoarding behavior is often severe because hoarders do not recognize it as a problem. It is much harder for behavioral therapy to successfully treat compulsive hoarders with poor insight about the disorder.” Art collectors, on the other hand, are seen as admirable and sexy. Little chance they’re going to see themselves as being in need of an intervention. Perhaps the art collecting equivalent of voluntarily getting rid of the Jif jar is flipping a few works.

  I have a friend named Larry who collects beer cans, but his wife has a dictum: no beer cans may cross the doorsill of his collecting room. Larry then made a beer can holder that attaches itself to any surface, ceilings included. He patented his holder design and started selling them commercially. His is a capitalism feel-good story that highlights another dark side of hoarding and collecting, that our failures and successes in regards to how we accumulate things are viewed almost entirely through a capitalist lens. “How much did you get for it?” I’m uncertain what Marx said specifically about art collectors (if anything), but if he did, it probably wasn’t kind. Some people collect art that’s purely political, or purely conflict-based, or highly pedigreed by theory, but I wonder if they’re just trying to sidestep out of the spotlight of the art economy’s vulgarity. But wait—did they magically win their collection in a card game? Did their collection arrive for free at their doorstep from Santa Claus? No, it had to be purchased with money, and it’s at this level where the dance between academia, museums and collectors turns into a beyond-awkward junior high school prom. I tried explaining a Tom Friedman (1965–) work to my brother. Its title is A Curse, and the work consists of a plinth over which a witch has placed a curse (currently at The Hayward Gallery). I told my brother it might easily be worth a million dollars, whereupon his eyes became the collective eyes of the Paris Commune, aching to sharpen the guillotine’s blades and then invade, conquer and slay Frieze.