Wow—concepts once reserved for God and natural selection. And here I thought we were just talking about selling stuff. Who knew?
On the break, Jenn sidles up to Martin. “I had no idea you stuttered as a kid. Really, you’re such a great public speaker, I never would have guessed it.”
Before he can respond, one of the conference conveners gives Martin a warm hug. “Don’t worry,” she says, “the World Trade Center is the safest place in New York City.”
Stricken, Martin flashes me a wide-eyed look over the woman’s shoulder.
I’m going to hell, he mouths.
The next two speakers do me in. Not only have they put beacons on store shelves, but they have placed them on benches and trash bins throughout Manhattan.
“Imagine it,” says the one in the yellow shirt. The room is hot, and he’s sweating profusely. “Once enough apps have enough beacon receptors, we should be able to know who’s walking by a given store every day and feed that data to merchants, so that I could say to Sal at Sal’s Consumer Electronics on 10th Avenue, ‘Hey Sal, there’s this guy who I know is in the market for a cell phone ‘cause he’s been searching Best Buy and Walmart and researching different brands, and he’s walking past your door at around 5:10 p.m. every day, Monday through Friday, and I bet that if you were to beam him a great deal on one of your phones, that business could be yours!’”
“Hyper-localization, hyper-personalization, hyper-contextualization,”
intones his partner. “These are the characteristics of Data Driven Personal Retail, and it’s not just a dream. It’s a reality. When you’re sitting at a red light near a KFC and an ad for Chicken Littles shows up on your Waze screen, you’re seeing it in action.”
In many accounts of near-death experiences, people describe the sensation of levitating and looking down on their own bodies lying on the floor or the operating room table, often surrounded by the people trying to revive them. I’m feeling that strange but powerful mix of curiosity and disbelief right now. Here I sit, the Hudson shooting shards of light through the windows behind me, in a room full of nice people with dogs and dinner plans and a recorded episode of This is Us awaiting them at home, hearing about how these other really smart people have developed extraordinary technology to merge physical and digital experience, to intercept people with enticements to act on ideas they barely knew they had, to harness the exceptional power of having the Internet in one’s pocket, all in the service of getting people to buy more stupid shit that they don’t need.
I’m frantically taking notes for the obligatory report-out when I get back to the office, every insane story of mobile-commerce, every malapropism (“let’s be proactive and not reactionary!”), all the new words like omnichannel and pretail; each and every example of how you can see a virtual image of a store on a subway wall, touch what you want, and discover it delivered to your home five minutes after you get there. My writing is getting smaller and smaller as scenarios cascade out of the perky coral-hued mouth of Google’s “retail imagineer,” stories about how shoppers can connect with product experts in Google Hangouts, make their purchases with Google Wallet, which then passes user data to retailers who rely on Google Express to fulfill the purchases. I record that the Me-Ality app installed at select Bloomingdale’s locations somehow scans your body and recommends items of clothing based on your measurements. At least I think that’s what it does, because I’m writing so fast that my cursive is illegible. It looks like it’s come from someone else’s hand.
Tonight, back at LaGuardia, Martin, Jenn, and I drink. We talk about music and the World Cup and vacations.
As the jet lifts off and the New York City lights unfurl beneath my eyes like a breaking wave on this hot summer night, I rest my sweaty cheek on the cool plexiglass porthole. Tomorrow, I’ll have my breast surgery, wondering until I go under why I’ve subjected myself to another wound—another excised warning that will simply confirm what I already know.
A line from a Mary Oliver poem comes to mind and won’t leave. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?32
Burn like Oak (Present)
Summer 2016
To celebrate my birthday, I take a vacation day from work and head out to Walden Pond before the parking lot closes. It is the hottest day of the year, and by 10:30 a.m., the beach is already dense with strollers, umbrellas, small tents, and sticky bodies of all ages.
Out near the farthest buoy line, an overweight tattooed man with a shaven head and big bristling beard is cavorting with his wife, also large and adorned with inky pictures of eagles and lightning. He pulls her toward him, she splashes him lightly and pushes him over, and he provides a running football broadcaster’s narration of their frolic. Their kids are tossing a ball nearby, their son making diving catches in the water. They are buoyant; they jostle and bounce, freed from the greedy pull of gravity. They look like Hell’s Angels or Idaho militia members, like the couples you see in news photos of American flag-draped Trump supporters or Second Amendment defenders.
Of course these are caricatures; I know nothing about these people except that they have an outlaw fashion aesthetic. But I also know that regardless of what they think about firearms or candidates, whether they appreciate diversity or want to take “their” country back by any means necessary, right now they are simply enjoying the blessing of cool clear water on a blistering day. As their leaping son practically knocks over a small Indian girl nearby, the woman quickly apologizes to the child’s mother and father, and the man chastises his boy. In heavily accented, lilting speech, the Indian parents assure them that no harm’s been done, that their daughter is startled but not hurt, and the four parents smile wryly at each other, united in the challenge of keeping their children both lively and safe.
Maybe the white parents are celebrity chefs or software engineers, though I doubt it. But even if they are true to the stereotype I’ve assigned to them—even if they are struggling to make ends meet, feeling angry and disenfranchised and blaming exactly the wrong people for their hardships—today, right now, they are just grown-ups enjoying simple, childish pleasures. Except for the handful of triathletes in wet suits grimly trying to improve their mile times, so are all of us dunking, paddling, floating mammals here today. In this instant, I can’t imagine that they are thinking about banning immigrants or protecting the right to own automatic weapons or denying the fact of climate change. No, in this sun-baked, water-splashed moment if I were to ask them why they held those beliefs and why those convictions were so important, I think that they would look at me in blank puzzlement, unable to remember why they’re so aggrieved. But ask them tonight, when they’re back in their overpriced rental or heavily mortgaged saltbox house, and they’ll once again channel the vitriol that’s been scripted for them.
I swim away, out to the middle of the pond. Looking back on this, my birthday, I’m angry that in my lifetime, not enough has changed. The poor are poorer, the exiled are finding no safe haven, and the ruling class is still all too successful at pitting the have-nots against one another. But looking ahead, I’m not quite despairing, and find a strange hope in the riot of colors dotting the shoreline. Thermoses, beach umbrellas, insulated baskets, backpacks, kayaks, brightly packaged tubes and bottles of sunscreen—these are the human inventions that enable us to be mobile, to protect ourselves and our children while adapting to a rapidly changing environment. They are the mundane but profoundly practical products of imagination and skill that people centuries from now will dig up in deserts that once were lakes.
And all of them were created by the people who populate the pond, the people without summer homes who rediscover their shared humanity on days like this.
Winter 2017
Late in the 2016 Republican presidential primary season, Donald Trump’s campaign engaged in a breathtaking feat of denial. His leading opponent, the equally reprehensible Ted Cruz, ran an ad feat
uring a 1999 television interview in which candidate Trump declared himself to be “strongly pro-choice.” In response, Trump’s campaign sent Cruz’s a cease-and-desist letter charging Cruz with defamation for running an ad “replete with outright lies” for suggesting that Trump was, well, pro-choice. In other words, Trump pointed to Cruz’s use of documentary footage showing him declaring his support for abortion rights as evidence of his opposition to those rights.
Now that flagrant inversion of reality has become the norm. This morning’s Guardian ran a story about Pete Hoekstra, the now President Trump-appointed U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, who was interviewed by a Dutch television journalist.33
“You mentioned in a debate that there are no-go zones in the Netherlands,” said reporter Wouter Zwart, “and that cars and politicians are being set on fire in the Netherlands.”
“I didn’t say that. This is actually an incorrect statement,” Hoekstra replied. “We would call it fake news.”
Hoekstra was then shown a video clip of himself saying those exact words.
“You called this fake news,” Zwart said. “Obviously—”
“I didn’t call that fake news,” Hoekstra interrupted. “I didn’t use the words today.”
“No?” challenged a remarkably composed Zwart.
“No,” Hoekstra answered belligerently. “I don’t think I did.”
I suppose I should no longer be astounded by such brazen falsehood—not just the original lie (“I didn’t say that… We would call it fake news”), but the lie about the lie (“I didn’t call that fake news.”) After all, in a recent interview that Trump did with the New York Times, fact-checkers at the Washington Post clocked twenty-four false or misleading statements made by the president in twenty minutes.34 And that’s just a half-hour out of one day.
But I am. Amazed and terrified. Having capitulated to the “filter bubble” that is the Internet, having surrendered to the notion that by default, Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and every other social “news” site is going to serve us what some algorithm thinks we’ll like and shrink our world rather than expand it, we’re now in danger of giving up on facts and the notion of some shared, objective reality altogether.
I’ve watched in fascination as journalists struggle with how to handle falsehoods when they emanate from the President and Commander-in-Chief. Should the press simply ignore tweets such as those about the “millions” who “illegally” voted for Hillary Clinton? Present them as assertions with no evidence. Or call them lies?
“Reality is beside the point,” Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, told the New Republic, in reference to his state’s efforts to limit voting rights. “Whether there’s widespread voter fraud or not, the people believe there is.”35
Belief—based on aspiration, on rage, on aggrievement, on impossible hopes, on the fundamental desire to believe—is the currency that fuels the sale of products and of candidates. And creating beliefs through the conscious manipulation of unconscious emotion has long been the province of advertisers, marketers, and political campaign strategists.
But up until twenty or thirty years ago, belief was a product of how one interpreted fact. Now it is replacing it.
This phenomenon didn’t begin with Trump. In a prescient 2004 article, Ron Suskind wrote of George W. Bush, “… he’s a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for signs of weakness, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.”36
Bush advisor and Republican strategist, Karl Rove, made autocratic sureness his guiding political principle. Here’s how Suskind described it: “The aide [Rove] said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality… That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities… We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
Bush, Rove, and their fellow actors led us into a war based on a lie. And now, twelve years later, here we are, studying the tweets of a man whose campaign and supporters seemingly summon new realities at will, and trust that through confidence and virality, they’ll stick until it’s time for another, more convenient new reality.
Twitter makes this easy. So do scrolling tickers at the bottom of our television screens, and our reliance on pictures over words, sound bites over substance. We are entering what Joe Wiesenthal has described as a “post-literate age,” noting that, “Before the invention of writing, knowledge existed in the present tense between two or more people; when information was forgotten, it disappeared forever. That state of affairs created a special need for ideas that were easily memorized and repeatable (so, in a way, they could go viral). The immediacy of the oral world did not favor complicated, abstract ideas that need to be thought through. Instead, it elevated individuals who passed along memorable stories, wisdom and good news.”37
The 2016 presidential campaign tale of a child sex ring being run by Hillary Clinton and John Podesta out of the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor was certainly a memorable story. That’s why Michael Flynn, Jr., son of Trump’s disgraced-turned-informant National Security Advisory, tweeted even after a man walked into this restaurant firing his AR15 rifle, “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story.”
Social media enables liars to lie at unprecedented scale. It lets manipulators invent and amplify hashtags and phrases, hateful tales that are so quickly so ubiquitous that they infuse our consciousness despite our best efforts to elude them.
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” says Syme, a loyal servant of the Party, early in George Orwell’s 1984. He goes on to extoll the virtues of language that’s increasingly simple and lacking in nuance. Who needs the word “bad” (let alone “flawed” or “erratic” or, heaven forbid, “multi-dimensional”) when you can simply describe someone or something as “ungood.” When your aim is to police thought and enforce submission, the more blunt and binary your vernacular, the better. After all, as Orwell noted, “…if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”38
Like all great demagogues before him, that’s a principle that Donald Trump understands, and his communications channels of choice—Twitter and Fox News—embrace.
“I’m a better person than the people I’m running against,” Trump declared while campaigning. “I’m really good at the trade,” he crowed at rallies. “I’m really good at the borders.” Assert anything often enough and with enough vigor, Trump believes, and people will accept it.
But he goes a step farther than his equally cynical brethren in this and past political contexts. Trump has intuited that by constantly repeating that he’s a winner, that people love him, that his poll numbers are better than anyone else’s, he can marginalize the non-believers. If the majority of people say that he is the best, then that is the de facto truth, just as in Orwell’s Oceania, if the party says 2+2=5 and enough citizens repeat it, the dissenter—the statistical outlier—is, by definition, insane. After all, in Oceania and presumably in TrumpWorld, “Sanity is statistical.”
“Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows,” Orwell wrote in yet another pithy summation of Oceania’s ethos.39 He could have just as easily been describing ours. Political discourse throbs with rage, reproach and hyperbole. Not just hyperbole, but the biggest, boldest hyperbole the world has ever seen.
“I love Mexico, I love China, I love many of these countries that rip us off because we have leaders that are incompetent and don’t know what they’re doing,” Trump frothed on
the campaign trail. “China in particular—that’s the big one. The greatest abuse of a country that I think I’ve ever seen financially—China.…What they’ve done to us is the greatest single theft in the history of the world. They’ve taken our jobs, they’ve taken our money, they’ve taken everything.”
Who “they” is and what they’ve taken does, of course, depend on the day, the state, the audience. “… The rage that one felt,” Orwell wrote of the 1984 ritual he dubbed the Two Minutes Hate, “was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”40
We all know it now, feel it multiple times over the course of the day, that surge in outrage that flares, then leaves us depleted. Yes, we share it with others, but our “community” burns like paper—hot and fast. What we need is to burn like oak, slowly, long-term. And even when the flame subsides, we need to smolder long enough to ignite another log.
Summer, 2017
I’m studying a picture from the summer of 1976. My parents, my Uncle Herbie, and my Auntie Anne are in their bathing suits, arrayed on deck chairs, smiling into the camera. More likely, they are beaming at the scene that lies behind the photographer—the large, rugged contours of Quebec’s Lac Archambault, the small island within swimming distance of the dock where a pine tree juts out over its rocky face like a jaunty hat.
Then in his early fifties, Herbie, my father’s brother, was the oldest of the quartet. My mother, at forty-seven, was the youngest. Until a few months ago, she was the lone survivor. Now she too is gone.
But then, my God, you can’t imagine four people more full of life. The intensive parenting years are behind them; my cousins, brother, and I are by then all in college or have launched from it. They are all employed, but not consumed by their work. The best of friends, they are together in the spot on this planet that nourishes them most with its evasive sun, temperamental water, rounded green mountains, and haunting family of loons that glide across the lake every evening at dusk.
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