This All-at-Onceness

by Wittes Schlack, Julie

  That “personal apparatus” has made McLuhan’s global village a reality, supplanting drums and smoke signals with geotags and mobile apps that make instant sharing across geographies and time zones the new normal. But in April of 1965, COMSAT Corporation’s launch of the Intelsat I communications satellite (nicknamed Early Bird), was anything but routine. This extraordinary 76-pound device enabled instant, continuous television, radio, and fax transmissions between the United States and Europe for the first time in history. Within a month, President Lyndon Johnson used this new capability in service of the Cold War. To counter the Russian media blitz in honor of the twentieth anniversary of V-E day, and in violation of diplomatic protocol prohibiting the leader of a country from directly addressing the citizens of another without prior notification, LBJ broadcast an anniversary address of his own to the people of Britain and Italy.

  That same year, 1965, one of that satellite’s inventors, Dr. Harold Rosen, proposed a special Educational Television Satellite for NASA. “The benefit to mankind of such a system staggers the imagination. It may well be the major return to humanity of man’s venture into space,” he said.30

  Two years later, Early Bird was one of the three satellites enabling Our World.

  Our World would turn out to be The Beatles’ last live, real-time performance. Ask any music fan of my age what was the first music video released in the United States, and they’ll instantly tell you that it was “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the B-Side to “Penny Lane.” Mark, his lifelong friend, Gil, and I can’t agree on whether this video debuted on The Ed Sullivan Show or on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, but we all remember the puzzled disappointment with which we watched it.

  With its somberly psychedelic special effects, the black-and-white video was kind of cool, even by today’s standards. But we were expecting to see them perform live on television. I’d delicately adjusted the rabbit ears antenna on our TV that night, hoping that the right combination of angle and touch would once again transform the snow on the screen to a clear image. I’d been anticipating a shared experience, with John and Paul and George and Ringo, and with the millions of other kids just like me. Sitting alone, cross-legged on my parents’ bed with its golden, pilled polyester quilt watching a short movie, didn’t qualify as one. This was the first time that a televised performance on a live show was canned. Our music was being served up as a product that could be replayed, rebroadcast, unchanging.

  Of course now that’s precisely the allure of the Internet. Each of us is a market of one, calling up what we want, when we want it, amplifying our solitude as we dial up entertainment. It’s not all dancing cats and sneezing pandas; people create and watch more than clever commercials and newlyweds competing with other unknown, online newlyweds for who can perform the most jaw-dropping First Dance at their weddings. But as I spend hours at my computer, looking to YouTube for memories and diversion, I sometimes fear that we’re becoming inert clams, sustained by simply filtering the plankton-rich culture that continually flows through us.

  “What we’re trying to do is save the world,” Harold Rosen had said in describing his goals for the satellite system he was creating. But in 1967, when Our World aired, I would have found that sentiment laughable. We would save the world through protest and celebration, by condemning and persuading, embracing and rejecting. Saving the world was an essentially human pursuit, incompatible with anything that had a metallic, industrial sheen. Then, I believed technical and military pursuits to be intimately, inextricably bound. Any technology was a gear in the war machine. Then, I didn’t think of the car I longed for or the television I watched as machines.

  Now, though, I live by and through technology. And as I surf through the indiscriminate torrent of tweets and posts and videos about Starbucks and the Syrian civil war, about hurricane victims and Zappo’s shoes and Iran’s nuclear program and Black Friday sales and laughing babies, I better understand both Rosen’s utopian vision and McLuhan’s dystopian one.

  Digital technology alienates us from our own experience, causes us to see lives—even our own—as films, with poor pacing and disturbing discontinuities, with plots that are too formulaic or too unsettling. On some days, I look at my youth and young adulthood as my favorite movie, the one I never tire of, and am mystified by the sequel, the one in which I feel I’m masking as a corporate sell-out, working for The Man. On other days, I regard my job as a way to turn “consumers” back into people in the eyes of the frantic advertisers and marketers vying for a piece of their nervous system, to reveal the humanity beneath the scrolling digits. But the speed that this same technology now enables, makes empathy scalable, turns us back into a culture where the sensory experience of someone else’s suffering or joy is as immediate as a flame, as tangible and sharp as a paper cut.

  I am much older than I was in 1967, but I still love to look at the sky. I know that for every light emanating from a used car lot, there is one showing the world what joyful rebellion in a city square looks like. The points of light arcing through it have, over time, made me curious, awed, and anxious. For every surveillance satellite—masked and silent—there are millions of particles colliding, the conflict in their charges producing a gorgeous illumination.

  To Be of Use (2011)

  My corporate office is across the street from the Federal Reserve, and catty corner from Dewey Square in the city’s financial district, where the Occupy Boston movement set up its tent city. Every day I’d walk over there for lunch and go exploring. The signs were more eclectic than in my day, ranging from End the Fed to Bring our Troops Home to Keep the Lexington School Committee Independent. I found no rigid adherence to a narrow platform there. As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members, read the Statement of Purpose accepted by Occupy Wall Street’s New York City General Assembly in the disturbingly balmy fall of 2011:

  ... that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.

  Or, as one particularly pithy sign in Zuccotti Park noted, Shit is Fucked Up. Not as metaphorical, perhaps, as We’ve carried the rich for 200 years; let’s get them off our backs, but the Occupiers’ actions generated much more tangible hoopla. We are the 99 percent arose as a mantra of the Occupy Wall Street movement, memed its way out of New York to other Occupy encampments, into public consciousness and casual conversation.

  In Dewey Square, the causes people championed were quirkier and more personal than those championed by our stilted rhetoric from the 1970s. But the mix of people was familiar—vegetarian students, grizzled old lefties for whom leafleting was as natural as breathing, and homeless people reveling in the library tent and volunteer-staffed clinic, the three meals a day and the nightly concerts and lectures. As I picked my way through the paths between tents, I’d read the life stories hand-lettered on the sides of cardboard boxes, chat with the people basking in the autumn sun, drop money in the Donations tin, sign petitions, and study the daily schedule of activities: Meditation at 7:30, Lecture on “The False Promise of Capitalism” at 10, Free Clinic at 11, Class on Nonviolent Resistance at 2, Protest at State Street Bank at 4, free concert at 6:30. It was as if Jerry Garcia and Howard Zinn had teamed up to run a day camp.

  And though electronic amplification was allowed at the Occupy Boston site, sometimes the squatters chose to use the “human microphone” method of communication developed at Occupy Wall Street. Recycle your soda cans, Free Guam, We are the 99 percent, Bagels for breakfast —the short, declarative sentence would start with a single person, then be passed through Dewey Park by small groups relaying what they’d just heard at the to
p of their lungs, like an improv troupe playing Broken Telephone.

  Thirty years after leaving Allentown, little more than a protest tourist, I took my daily constitutional in this encampment. Then I’d return to the lobby of my office building, pass my employee photo ID in front of the sensor on the granite reception desk, and ride the elevator up to my seventh floor cubby with its coveted window view. Only then did I feel like an imposter.

  On the wall behind my desk, adjacent to the Amnesty International calendar and the corporate style guide, hangs a yellowing Marge Piercy poem, one I’ve carried with me to every job at which I’ve had a desk.31

  To be of use

  The people I love the best

  jump into work head first

  without dallying in the shallows

  and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

  They seem to become natives of that element,

  the black sleek heads of seals

  bouncing like half-submerged balls.

  I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

  who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

  who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

  who do what has to be done, again and again.

  I want to be with people who submerge

  in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

  and work in a row and pass the bags along,

  who are not parlor generals and field deserters

  but move in a common rhythm

  when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

  The work of the world is common as mud.

  Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

  But the thing worth doing well done

  has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

  Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

  Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

  but you know they were made to be used.

  The pitcher cries for water to carry

  and a person for work that is real.

  I no longer have the “massive patience…to move things forward” and probably never did. But what I miss—and felt during those walks in Dewey Square—is the sense of moving in a common rhythm. I’ve never wanted to go skydiving or run a race, let alone win one. My dreams have always been to sing in a gospel choir, to dance in the chorus of West Side Story; to bring in the harvest, any harvest.

  So when the protestors were finally evicted from the park, leaving not through gradual attrition but, like everything today, all at once, I was bereft. By the next morning, their colorful mosaic of tents and food trucks and handmade signs had vanished, leaving behind just yellowing grass, cast-iron fencing, and a few barren benches.

  Beacons (2015)

  With its vaulting, poured-concrete ceilings, faux marble floors, aisles wide as boulevards and almost as long, Chicago’s convention center—McCormick Place—looks like a set from Triumph of the Will. As I hobble down its empty length in my dress-up shoes, I envision it holding tens of thousands of uniformed men, clones with pale faces and chiseled square chins. The vastness is overwhelming; in the unused exhibition hall in the south wing, the forklifts look like Tonka Toys, their hard-hatted drivers little Lego men.

  MccormickPlace.com informs me that the complex offers 2.6 million square feet of exhibit space alone—not including its 173 meeting rooms, four ballrooms, and 18,000-person assembly hall. But for all its capacious mass, what lies inside it is utterly ephemeral. Central American waitstaff bustle into improvised dining rooms defined by movable walls and curtains, whisk food on and off tables—then disappear. Cookie plates, baskets of salty snacks, urns of coffee and fruit-infused water appear on tables strategically placed mid-exhibition hall for the duration of each “expo break”—then vanish. Entire food courts pop up or evaporate based on the size and number of events going on in a given day.

  I’m here to attend and speak at the annual Consumer Insights Today! Conference. An aerial view of the 600 of us—some of whom I now recognize from countless meetings and conferences like this one—would look like a tiny smudge, a stain on the floor of one of McCormick Place’s many corridors. Eerily, we seem to be the only conference in the joint.

  In the first presentation of the morning, a guy with a shock of white hair, thick-framed hipster glasses, black shirt, black jacket, black pants, black shoes, and no socks stands before a slide displaying a dramatically bifurcated silhouette.

  “People, especially young people, are paradoxical.” His voice, quiet and effeminate, is at odds with the boldness of his graphics and attire. “They revile consumerism but voluntarily watch ads on YouTube; they deplore Nike’s sweatshops but breezily buy iPhones made under similar working conditions. And as a nation, we like our celebrities to reflect our conflicts.”

  He advances the slides through a series of portraits: Sexy but child-like (Marilyn Monroe); virile but vulnerable (Johnny Depp); brainy but degenerate (James Franco); Aryan but inclusive (Heidi Klum). But dialectical or not, members of this cohort need a single name so that pundits can discuss them and agencies can specialize in marketing to them.

  “The Torn Generation, I call them,” he says.

  Why, I wonder. Isn’t contradiction—the longing for novelty and familiarity, for challenge and comfort—characteristic of every generation, fundamental to being human? And today, in the twenty-first century, isn’t everybody of every age over thirteen always as ambivalent as I am?

  The presentation dwindles to an end, and I flee the darkened room in search of coffee. Outside the window-lined corridor, the fog has lifted to reveal Lake Michigan, a deep and gorgeous blue on this early June morning. But it, too, is strangely vacant, bereft of sails, tugboats, any sign of the Chicago shore life that I know must be stirring a mile or so north of where I stand. For a second, I wonder if one of those science-fiction movie plots has come true, if overnight some lethal virus has struck down all but those of us encased in the nation’s largest convention center. Or perhaps it’s the opposite. Perhaps we’re the dead ones, unknowingly incapable of seeing actual life.

  Reluctantly, I turn away from the big, silent view and plod to the next session, where a drab man from AniMate (“Brand Matchmaker for Today’s Consumer!”) explains the neuroscience behind the merchandising of cookies.

  “Our unconscious emotions direct our conscious thoughts,” he explains in a gentle sing-song. He could be telling us a bedtime story. “And our unconscious is still really primitive, based on animal responses like hunger and anger and fear. That’s why we feel aroused in the grocery store, and if we succumb to unhealthy or socially undesirable impulses—and, I mean, who doesn’t?—it’s also why we feel ashamed after leaving it.”

  No surprise there. Of course our emotions around sweet snacks are complex. (I suspect that this is a man who’s never bought his own groceries.) No, what’s unnerving is how the AniMate researchers arrived at this conclusion. In-store beacons, little devices on store shelves that sense your presence via a signal generated by an app on your phone, capture how long you stand in front of the cookie shelves, determining whether you’re spending more time considering the Oreos or the Pepperidge Farm Milanos. Then they can send you offers and promotions, or, in this case, images of the products you’re already studying, accompanied by positive and negative adjectives describing them. If it’s a positive adjective—healthy, for example, or delicious—you’re instructed to swipe the screen toward you. You swipe away if a negative adjective like sugary or overpriced is displayed. The theory is that if you really believe Milanos are tastier than Oreos, you’ll swipe toward yourself on delicious more quickly when the Milanos package appears on your screen.

  Come to me, we’re signaling with one swipe. Get away from me, says another.

  “Imagine the possibilities,” the AniMate guy croaks, his anemic delivery a
t odds with the inspirational words some brand matchmaker has probably written for him.

  I do, and it exhausts me.

  At lunch, I scan nametags before sitting down, looking for people from prospect companies, the people I know I should be trying to meet. But this shopping for tablemates is difficult and rude, and I quickly settle for the first vacancy I can find.

  To my right is a woman in her late twenties who works as a market researcher for Subway sandwich shops. She confirms that yes, weight-losing Jared, the Subway spokesman, was trusted up until the day he was arrested, but no, they don’t spend much time doing qualitative research into the needs of Subway guests, preferring to infer it from the relative volume of Meatball Marinaras and Classic Tunas sold.

  On my left is a woman of similar age and complexion to the Subway researcher. She’s a Consumer Insights Associate for HomeAway, the vacation rental company that, I learn, also owns all the other online vacation rental companies I assumed were its competitors. Yes, Airbnb certainly is a competitive threat—though a bigger problem for hotel companies than for hers—and no, she hates living in Texas and fervently hopes to leave as soon as her boyfriend finishes graduate school there.