The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (25 page)

“THE
end of absence” is a disobliging subject—precisely because it looks, to the casual eye, like a lovely collection of gains. What’s more, once an absence is ended, we can hardly remember what use it had to begin with. Indeed, why complain at all? Bemoaning the end of an absence is, it seems, the duty of Luddites and cranks. Which is to say, we brush off those who eulogize such losses.

Besides, maybe the real eulogy was delivered a long time ago. We all like to think we’re living on the brink of the future, that this is the pivot point, but wasn’t our pace of life largely settled in the nineteenth century? In the shuttering of the Arts and Crafts movement and the final silencing of the bleeding Romantic poets, we find the last stand of some pre-modern sensibility. The boldest of these stands was made by those famous resisters—the Luddites (they suffered the firmest stamping out, too).

I’ve been called a “Luddite” a few times while working on this book. It always surprised me, because my approach is hardly a call to arms. Part of me is very ready to let the Giant Robot in the Sky take care of me. The breezy availability of new cloud technologies is as comforting and omnipresent as a god in the heavens. It’s only a small and stubborn part of me that resists and worries about the end of daydreaming and all that.

But the “Luddite” tag left me wondering . . . who were the Luddites, really? It turns out that the original nineteenth-century Luddites were hardly “Luddites” in our contemporary sense at all. We think of such people as being rabidly and unthinkingly anti-technology. But in fact the Luddites of Nottingham, and Lancashire, and Yorkshire—the textile workers who attacked the “power loom” in 1811 and beyond—were socialist revolutionaries, a group of workers who fought against crippling pay cuts, child labor, and changes to laws that had protected their livelihoods. They were fighting not
against
technology, but
for
fair treatment at the hands of a manufacturing elite. As Neil Postman has it: “
The historical Luddites were neither childish nor naïve
. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws, and customs had given them justice in the older world-view.” They were not anti-tech; they were pro-people. These so-called reactionaries also prefigured the modern union ethic, which would safeguard the rights and lives of so many.

• • • • •

What, then, should we ask of ourselves? I don’t think attacking Tumblr in a neo-Luddite revolution would do much good. But what are our responsibilities?

This book is a meditation more than a prescription. There are no ten easy steps to living a healthy digital life; there is no totalizing theory, no maxim, with which we can armor ourselves. Nor is digital abstinence the answer, absolute refusal being just another kind of dependence, after all.

Easy fixes are for easy problems. And what do real problems, big problems, call for? Experimentation and play. So here’s a pseudoprescription: Give yourself permission to go without some weekend—without any of the screens you look at when you’re bored. (Yes, you’ll feel anxious, at loose ends, but then what?) Ask yourself what might come from all those silences you’ve been filling up. What if you told your five-year-old the Internet was closed for Christmas vacation? What if you told yourself that?

Experiment. Live a little. And remember that fear of absence is the surest sign that absence is direly needed.

• • • • •

It’s in moments of mass change—as witnessed by the Luddites—that our most constant qualities appear. I’m with Ezra Pound, who felt moments of translation are always moments of clarity: It’s in moments of translation that we learn what’s indelible about us. We see what cannot pass forward into the new language, the new life, but we also see what things remain.

Here’s one indestructible thing:

Think of Chunyun, the period of travel in China leading up to the Lunar New Year. Over the course of two weeks, the world’s largest annual human migration takes place, with hundreds of millions of migrant workers and students returning home to be with their families, stretching the limits of rail systems (packed with citizens who cannot afford airfare). This is a country more connected to the Internet than any other, and it is also the site of humanity’s single largest expression of the basic drive to connect in person, its citizens putting up with slow and cumbersome travel in order to arrive at a more authentic bond.

Slower, more rare possibilities remain there, beneath the maelstrom of digital life. And the two kinds of connection—fast and slow, constant and rare—can even work together:

This summer, my brother and sister-in-law flew to Melbourne, Australia, to introduce their one-year-old boy, Levi, to his maternal grandmother. My nephew had seen his grandma only through weekly video chats online, knew her only as a cheerful image on a computer’s screen. Yet in Melbourne Airport—after twenty-three exhausting hours of travel—Levi (a shy infant, skeptical of strangers) held out his arms to his grandmother the moment he saw her and hugged her around the neck as though to say, “Oh,
there
you are!”

THE
end of absence is enigmatic; to talk about it, we need new words.

ANNOTATION DEPENDENCE

The contention that everything ought to be gilded in supporting text.
Looking up from the Google Map, Brady was discomfited to find himself in a baffling network of poorly labeled streets.

AVATAR CRUSH

The realization that someone’s online persona is infinitely preferable to his or her flesh-and-blood self.
Sarah was hilarious in text form, but I only had an avatar crush. In person she smelled like boiled eggs.

BETAPHOBIA

The fear of missing out on the first wave of a new technology.
Carlos got a serious hit of betaphobia when he saw her robotic dog ambling over to meet them.

CLOUD FAITH

The assumption that algorithms and crowdsourced data will invariably derive more meaningful outcomes.
Long ago, Derek had decided to choose movies based on cloud faith.

COMPOUND DISTRACTION

The experience of one person’s distraction compounding another’s.
Julie kept texting while I was talking about my cat, so I started texting, too.
Exists in two varietals: “Limited compound distraction” refers to a moment of positive feedback (
Bailey kept texting while I was telling him about the exam, so I started tweeting about it instead
), whereas “assumed compound distraction” refers to a predetermined atmosphere of distraction wherein sustained, meaningful interaction feels awkward and unwelcome (
Harry and Bryce mumbled to each other about Iran while scrolling through the news on their respective phones
).

CONDITION CREEP

The degree to which each generation loosens its privacy settings and becomes more at ease with purveyors of big data. Typified by the automatic acceptance of unread “terms and conditions.”
Jonah’s dad noted a bit of condition creep when he saw the links to homemade porn on his son’s Twitter feed.

DÉJÀ ZEITGEIST

The sense that all content is now merely a revision of content from earlier decades.
Why didn’t I think of that
Archie
satire?

DERIVAPHILIA

The love of derivative content over original content.
Did you see the
Dr. Who
T-shirt Liam made? Amazing.

DISCONNECTION RAGE

A sudden and unaccountably fierce meltdown brought on by five minutes of lost access to the Internet.
Susan bawled out the harried barista when the café’s Wi-Fi signal faltered.

FLASH CARD CONFESSIONAL

A genre of video in which the creator—typically a teenage female—confesses private trauma through a series of flash cards bearing Sharpie text.
The whole school saw her flash card confessional, so now she was a loser and an attention whore, too.

GOING WALDEN

The often ill-conceived decision to live without connective technologies for a period of time in order to cleanse the spirit.
“While we’re in Bali,” said Harry, “what if we went totally Walden?”

LENS AMNESIA

The experience of forgetting one is viewing reality through a particular technological lens.
George was shocked to discover that Rebecca had blurred out an unfortunate mole constellation in her profile photos.

MEGAPPROVAL

The act of boosting something online in as many arenas as possible, often through passive “like” systems on Facebook and such.
It wasn’t enough to just buy the new Death Cab for Cutie album, Tomer opened his laptop and started megapproving it.

MICRO-DEATH

The state of waiting for a technology to complete an internal process, of being put on hold by a computer.
Julie’s mouth dropped open an inch each time her tablet loaded a page.

MINIGEN

A distinct group of people born within five years of one another.
At the party, all the kids a minigen younger than me were obsessed with memes I’d never heard of.

OVERSPIRE

The experience of too much inspiration, resulting in no further gains in creativity.
Over the weekend I watched a dozen TED Talks in a row and got this vaguely overspired feeling.

PHONE BURROW

The act of becoming dead to the world while pouring all attention into a phone. (Often more obvious in public spaces.)
She froze in the intersection, dove into full phone burrow, and let her umbrella drop to the pavement.

PHONE DODGE

The act of compulsively checking one’s phone in an awkward situation.
Susan’s friends weren’t at the bar yet, so she pulled a phone dodge and became fascinated by her Pinterest feed.

PHONE LEASH

The limit from home that one can travel without a phone before anxiety kicks in.
He got two blocks down the street before his phone leash whipped him around.

SLOWNET

Programs that allow users to limit their access to online content.
Mariko kept on getting sucked into Katy Perry videos, so she jacked up her slownet settings.

STACCATO LOVE

A relationship maintained by short and detached bursts of intensely affectionate messaging.
Just one of Christina’s staccato love messages could keep him going for a week: OMG U R soooooooooo cute!!! ;-)

STRADDLE GENERATION

Neither digital natives nor wholly digital immigrants: They were born in the 1980s and will be the last people to remember life without the Internet.
After she got text-dumped, Stacey was determined to date only straddle gen guys. “They’re so romantic!”

SUPER-SANCTION

The act of granting worth or authenticity to something by upping its digital presence. For example, broadcasting images of the food one is about to consume. (Related to an Enlightenment bias that presumes making information available is akin to making it valuable.)
Before tucking in, the men gave their steaks a super-sanction on Instagram.

TANDEM TALK

The act of cruising Google in tandem with a phone conversation in order to source info or anecdotes and bolster one’s own ideas.
I thought Derek knew a lot about water bears, but it turned out he was just tandem talking.

TECH DILATION

An increased commitment to visual information, as encouraged by certain technologies.
Tom’s eyes were bugged out with tech dilation after burrowing into his phone for twenty minutes.

TECHAPROPISM

The appropriation of computer terminology to describe real-life experiences.
Nick walked into the party and muttered to his girlfriend, “None of your preferred networks are available.”

UNICORN

A person with no online presence who thus boasts a ghostly or mythical quality when he or she shows up in person.
Clay’s Facebook sabbatical lent him a unicorn quality and upped his cachet at grad parties.

UNMEMBER

To off-load a memory from brain to computer.
It was such a relief to unmember Dai’s boyfriend’s name.

WAGGING THE CROWD

Purposeful manipulation of ratings on crowd-based voting systems like Yelp.
Jim’s restaurant was failing, so he hired a click farm in India to wag the crowd.

MANY
people, wittingly or no, have helped bring this book together. I want to thank first Linda Jimi, who allowed an amazing chapter of her life to become my prologue. For taking the time to explain their research and ideas to me, huge thanks go to Lewis Altfest, Matt Atchity, Noel Biderman, Susan Blackmore, Ken Boesem, Peter Bregman, Morris Chapdelaine, Douglas Coupland, Nelson Cowan, Dave Craven, Dennis Danielson, Karthik Dinakar, Sidney D’Mello, Paul Eastwick, Markus Frind, Douglas Gentile, James Heilman, Dan Hobbins, Alberto Manguel, Andrew Ng, Heather O’Brien, Elias Roman, Gary Small, Carol Todd, and Jonathan Wegener.

This book would not exist without the vision of my superb agent, Anne McDermid, whose team I’m also indebted to. Editors in two offices were endlessly patient with a first-time author and made this book much, much better: Thanks to Jennifer Lambert at HarperCollins and to Maria Gagliano and Rachel Moore at Current. Thanks also to Brooke Carey, who believed in this project early on.

Early research was supported by assignments from two excellent editors: Rachel Giese at
Walrus
magazine and John Burns at
Vancouver
magazine.

For expansive talks and critical readings, I’m indebted to my friends Ed Bergman, Tyee Bridge, Anne Casselman, Kerry Gold, Charles Montgomery, Matthew Pearson, Michael Scott, Paul Siggers, Elsa Wyllie, and Bryson Young. For research assistance, great thanks go to Kathleen Golner. And for their constant encouragement (and so many lessons on storytelling), I’m raising a glass of Joie to the editors and art directors—past and present—at the hallowed halls of TC Media.

To the Harris and Park families, none of whom believed me when I told them how long it takes to write a book, huge thanks for the constant love and kindness. Thanks especially to my parents—Bob and Marilyn.

Lady B., my ideal reader and blindest supporter: I’m in your debt for tea, sympathy, and constant loafs.

Kenny, my partner and best friend: You made this book possible through your unwavering, unwarranted kindness and support. Love you.

Kafka tells us that “one can never be alone enough when one writes.” And I agree that moments of absence are necessary. But those stretches of solitude teach us to be more grateful for the just-as-necessary connections; the big journey of writing a book is neither envisioned nor completed in isolation.