This All-at-Onceness

by Wittes Schlack, Julie

  But we weren’t, no more than the citizens of the Czech Republic were in command of their own country in 1967. The fact was that the outcome was pre-ordained; the movie always ended as it began, with the flaming tenement. It had been scripted such that regardless of how we voted, each of the two branches ended up at the same decision point. To have done anything other than that would have been logistically daunting and cost-prohibitive. (Years later, as a computer game designer, I would come to appreciate the exponential complexity introduced by choice.) In the projection room, two perfectly synchronized movies were running—one showing the action caused by each Yes vote, the other showing the action caused by a No. The projectionist would simply put a lens cap over the projector to obscure the road not taken at each given juncture. The on-screen action never actually stopped and then began anew as if we, the audience, were inventing what would happen next. Those moments of frozen time were just a filmed static image, hundreds of frames of stillness exquisitely timed to contain the duration of each vote before the “live” action resumed.

  As with the Canada 67 movie, we felt like active participants. But we weren’t, not really. We were still just consumers with illusions of our own agency.

  And in these dark days dominated by dueling likes and hashtags, I wonder if like blind, cave-dwelling animals for whom sight no longer confers any survival benefit, our ability to take material action is becoming nothing more than the quaint vestige of a time when what we did actually mattered.

  Our World (1967-2015)

  I logged into my work email account today with the obligatory fourteen-character password containing at least one special character—@lluneedi$love. Then, as is my habit when goofing off at the office, I wiled away far too much time at wefeelfine.org, where brightly colored circles and dots swirl around like confetti. Click on one and you’ll see a randomly selected phrase that someone, somewhere, has just written about their inner state. I feel like I am falling into a lie, someone posted six minutes ago, at the same time that someone else wrote I feel closer to my heavenly father who knows the end from the beginning. I can spend hours exploring the postings lying behind the pink or yellow dots, the green or blue squares. I mentioned to him at some point that perhaps when you couldn’t see it, you felt more separation anxiety, reveals one. I feel like a mime because I am trying to bridge the language gap, says another.

  You can see why I do this, right? The posts are so voluminous and so profoundly serendipitous, that like the Kabbalist who believes that the voice of God could be finally understood if pi was calculated to the last digit, I keep clicking and clicking, hoping that some pattern will eventually reveal itself. That’s completely irrational, of course. Even if there is an underlying connection, it’s unlikely to be made visible in a random aggregation of postings, some of which are made simply because I feel like I have nothing to do. But the hunger driving me isn’t irrational. It’s programmed, this search for affinity, as hard-wired as our ability to sniff out pheromones or detect snakes.

  Growing up, I knew what community meant. My parents, first-generation Jewish Anglos who came of age during WWII in a city of French Catholics, transmitted both their knowledge of clan and their hunger to break free of it as ineluctably as their genes for crowded jaws and thick hearts. I entered my teens in 1967, during the Summer of Love, and my tribe comprised what felt like an entire generation whose common convictions would, we were sure, stop war and remake the world.

  But sometime early in this twenty-first century, I lost sight of the difference between a crowd and a community, and between simultaneity and an actual shared experience. The millions of people whose status updates float into my line of sight on wefeelfine.org are taking simultaneous action, but the sheer volume and velocity of these expressions almost ensures that nobody is undergoing a common experience.

  Ironically, this disconnected digital concurrency had its roots in what was probably the largest shared encounter in modern history. In June of 1967, the first live satellite-enabled television broadcast was aired. Roughly ten thousand technicians and producers worldwide not only wrote scripts and shot footage, but coordinated transmission among four satellites across the International Date Line. Over 1.5 million kilometers of cable were used to quite literally link up the planet and enable the broadcast of Our World, a three-hour aggregation of short, wide-ranging documentary segments, to thirty-one countries.

  I’d made a mental note to investigate Our World after hearing a radio clip about it, thinking it a nice bit of cultural adornment that I could weave into a story sometime. Then recently, having gone online to win a debate with my husband about some obscure bit of pop music trivia, I came across a clip from the broadcast. It was The Beatles singing “All You Need is Love.” I didn’t love that song when it came out. But watching this performance, I found myself close to tears, moved by its goofy self-consciousness and absence of cynicism. I started googling, and after much searching, I was finally able to get a copy of the show in its entirety.

  The ground rules that the Our World producers set for all participating countries were few and clear. No politicians or heads of state could be involved or featured, and all material was to be presented live, not pre-recorded. Each country would have its own announcers, and translators would provide voice-over for the native audio when not in a country’s native language.

  I was thirteen when the broadcast occurred, in a year of big historical events and cultural milestones—the seminal Monterey Pop Festival, the Summer of Love in San Francisco, and the Expo ’67 World’s Fair in Montreal. But the entire effort was nearly derailed four days before the June 25 broadcast when, in an act of protest against Western coverage of the Six-Day War in the Middle East, the Eastern Bloc countries—the Soviet Union, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia—withdrew from the effort, taking their crews and one of the four communications satellites with them.

  The transformative nature of that war, the festering and spreading impact it would have on peoples, ideologies, and governments for the indefinite future, was obscured by its speed. But in speed, in near simultaneity of experience, the show’s producers saw the potential for unity. Dismissing the Soviet complaints as a piece of “vintage Cold War rhetoric,” Our World’s American anchor, Paul Nevins gravely voiced the team’s vision. “For the moment we’re going to ignore our differences and focus on what we have in common,” he declared in the U.S. introduction to the worldwide broadcast, as maps of the continents were linked by curving, glowing lines on screen. “ …For we are, in a sense, electronic Magellans, on an exploration without precedent.”

  With those words, the simulcast began.

  Watching the opening to Our World now, it seems like a frantic, crowdsourced video collage. In grainy grayness, fountains spurt, geysers spew, volcanoes erupt, and the Vienna Boys Choir sings as the phrase “Our World” appears in dozens of languages, one at a time, then dissolves.

  The sequence ends as abruptly as it started, and suddenly we are looking at a pastiche of pedestrian scenes from around the world, in real time. We’re in Linz, Austria, watching steel workers steer something indistinct into something equally indistinct, but fiery. Then we’re in a traffic helicopter, flying over Paris at dawn, while a barely audible male voice, muttering like a demented golf announcer, comments on the sparse traffic down below. Then we move yet again, this time to a narrow street in Tunis clogged with shoppers. The montage continues—a snippet of fishermen off the coast of Huelva, Spain; the exterior of a house in Glassboro, New Jersey; a farm in Ghost Lake, Alberta; a sparsely populated beach in Vancouver; a tunnel in Tokyo.

  It strikes me that this choice of scenes was driven by the laudable trust that the mundane habits and sights that bore us at best in our own daily lives will somehow be invested with greater meaning when we see them occurring in someone else’s, continents away. “People are people,” the producers seemed to be saying. “We all go to work, raise children, enj
oy a day at the beach, get stuck in traffic.” By hop-scotching through time zones, by showing the daily routines as they actually occurred, they hoped that they could break through non-temporal boundaries as well.

  The three-hour show consisted of an aggregation of short, wide-ranging segments grouped into five major themes. “This Moment’s World” panned the planet showing babies who had just been born, literally making their first entry into our world. “World Hunger and Overcrowding” examined the challenges these children were likely to encounter as they grew, featuring a diverse set of civil and social engineering projects––from shrimp farms to planned communities—intended to address them. In an earnest celebration of human potential, the next two sections, “Aspirations of Excellence” and “Artistic Skill,” displayed athletes and famous dancers and musicians training, racing, rehearsing, and performing. The final portion, “The World Beyond,” returned to the lofty ambitions of the opening proclamations about the show’s purpose, featuring the scientists and technicians leading the efforts to explore outer space.

  It showcased giants of the twentieth-century art world—people like Calder and Miro, whose legacies have endured. And it showed ordinary and anonymous people—Japanese subway workers and Canadian cattle farmers, Spanish fishermen and Australian ticket-takers, Swedish rowers and Mexican dancers—people whose daily lives were fundamentally no different from those of the people watching them.

  For the artists, technicians, and journalists involved in its making, Our World was not only a technical marvel, but a social elixir. Narrative voice-overs between the show’s segments offered urgent expositions of humanity’s challenges, framed in hopeful explanations of how technology would help us address them. Our World was to be the pixelated proof that through the efforts of “ingenious men on five continents,” led by educated humanists, mankind could transcend its political divisions and enlightened liberalism could harness our efforts to the greater good.

  An estimated 400 million people watched Our World, the largest television audience to that date. But more significantly, this was probably also the broadest and most concurrent experience of any sort in human history. Other natural events—climate changes, epidemics, and wars—had a much more profound impact, but they unfolded much more gradually over time. Multinational and democratic, Our World represented the birth of what media scholar Marshall McLuhan dubbed, “the global village.” He believed that the simultaneity enabled by this technology would create empathy and mutual responsibility between peoples and cultures.8

  The rational progress envisioned by the show’s producers and participants wasn’t immediately realized. The show aired on the cusp between two transformative years. In 1967, idealism and technology briefly merged to stoke the belief that through large-scale, electronically enabled experiences, humanity would finally understand that we shared a single, sprawling but unsteady home, and join together to remodel it.

  But if 1967 was a year infused with promise and hope, 1968 was its opposite. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, the police riots at the Chicago Convention went unpunished, and the flares of freedom in Czechoslovakia were doused with dispatch by Soviet tanks. In 1968, after peaceful protest was met with violence and the embodiments of hope were literally shot down, many of us sighed, brooded, grew up, and channeled all that hope into building happy little homes.

  It’s always fascinating to look into the past at projections of the future, exploring which prophecies were and weren’t realized, and why. Some of the Our World segments—such as an overhead view of the morning commute in Paris or a brief glimpse of Austrian steel workers on the job––were mundane. Others, though—such as an in-depth look at Habitat and Cumbernauld, two large, planned communities that exist to this day—offered bold predictions that didn’t pan out. Some of the musicians featured—people like Leonard Bernstein and The Beatles—have legacies that are not only extraordinary in their own right, but that informed and reflected the times they lived in. Others, though, like the long-forgotten stars of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, had careers that flared and then fizzled over the course of mere months.

  And yet look around. McLuhan’s 1967 vision of an electronically enabled global village, one where signs of suffering and calls to action are passed from person to person and nation to nation almost instantaneously, has finally come to fruition.

  But corporations are making it happen, not governments, not journalists. As I write this, Facebook has just announced that it is sending up a satellite to beam broadband Internet access to sub-Saharan Africa. It will be sent up on a Falcon 9 rocket owned by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s commercial space launch firm. Once in geostationary orbit, Facebook’s satellite will be operated by Eutelsat, an international communications company that already manages thirty-nine other satellites for media and telecommunications companies. And Facebook isn’t relying just on satellites. In May 2014 the company bought Ascenta, a British maker of high-altitude, unmanned, solar-powered drones capable of beaming Internet access to suburban and urban areas.

  Are these examples of visionary entrepreneurs stepping in to meet the human needs ignored by lumbering, self-serving government bureaucracies? Or are Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and their Silicon Valley buddies motivated by purely commercial aspirations as they seize first-mover advantage, making the land grab that will leave media-addicted consumers (increasingly fearful of being left alone with our own thoughts) with no other dealers to turn to?

  Are we at the gates of the digital Promised Land? Or are we exiles wandering in the desert with only tweeting Kardashians for company?

  The answer is both. We are alone in crowds, straining for a tenuous connection with others through our relentlessly tapping thumbs. But the Internet also enables us to create a sense of community—however transient and illusory, sometimes through expressions of sympathy and support, more often through the exposure and humiliation of others. We use social media to both exercise and condemn our most anti-social impulses.

  “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” explained McLuhan’s friend and colleague, Father John Culkin.9

  One way they’ve shaped us is to confuse simultaneity with shared experience. Yes, we can now digitally display our meals and vacations, and the far more significant sights and sounds of war and mass migration, to our friends or the world at large. Imagination, empathy, and electronic imagery are now inextricably braided. Still, as each of us looks down at our personal device, we weaken the capacity to empathize that is generated largely by live, oral, interpersonal conversation. We lose sight of the fact that we’re all occupying one subway car, the same sprawling city. Balkanized and personally branded, we can too easily forget that we’re all on this, our only planet, together.

  As a child of the 60s, my sense of connection was almost tactile. Many of the most moving and transformative experiences of my life were spent in large groups of people. In protests and marches and music festivals, I found not just emotional but sensory validation that beyond my immediate circle of friends and family, I belonged to a tribe, one organically formed out of experiences that were literally shared.

  I’m not just being nostalgic. We weren’t stupid to value communality. Society’s refusal to acknowledge that we’re on this gorgeous, faltering planet together has enabled the climate change that will demand radical, unwelcome adjustments in how we legislate and live. No community has gates impermeable enough to shield the lucky few from the pain of collapsing ice shelves and mass migrations. But mobilizing and sustaining the necessary fight for social and political overhaul requires a sense of “we,” demands physical gatherings and raised collective voices. Movements are not made of “likes,” but of actual people coming together as a corporeal whole.

  Now imagination, empathy, and electronic imagery are inextricably braided and as early as 1967, McLuhan recognized that the boundary between active engagement and consumption was beginning to blur. In June of
that year, as he helped to introduce Our World, his newest book had just been released. A typo on its cover reportedly delighted him. Mistakenly titled The Medium is the Massage, the collection of photographic collages, brief and cryptic pages, pages printed backwards and meant to be read in a mirror, even pages left intentionally blank, fascinated me. I had no idea what it meant, and I suspect that even many of its adult readers, like my parents, didn’t either. With its bold and demanding design, the book was undoubtedly cool.

  But its herky-jerky vitality belied its meaning. McLuhan was not offering a celebration, but a warning. In 1962, he argued that electronic technologies are an extension of the human central nervous system, that “instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain… And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.” His uncanny predictions couldn’t be understood until the changes he anticipated actually came to pass. And when they did, anyone living in the developed world in the twenty-first century couldn’t help but agree with his dire prognosis.

  I sometimes think of 1967 and Our World as representing the fulcrum between before and after. But on good days, I think that perhaps it is also a story about still, not just about the flare-up and extinction of idealistic energy, but also about its gestation, and the speed at which it travels through time and culture. On good days, I start to believe that what I remember isn’t over.

  More Love (1967)

  The compromises that adults make cause much of the suffering in the world, or, at best, fail to deal with the suffering. Acceptance of one’s lot—maintaining a silence about what can’t be said, lowering your expectations for your own life and for others, and understanding that nothing about the way the world works will never change—is the very marrow of maturity, and no wonder the newly fledged children look at it with horror and know that it won’t happen to them—or turn their backs on it for fear it will.