“We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier … a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.…Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”
– John F. Kennedy (1,225 Days Prior to Brain Explosion)
The TSA man is looking serious. “Sir, we’ve detected some trouble spots. We’re going to have to pat you down.” He points to a screen beside the body scanner, displaying a little cartoon of the human body. Red exclamations points are clustered around its dick and ass. This representation, I know, is tied to my dick — my ass. I agree with the machine. They’re trouble.
With the line extending behind us, snaking past the white plastic funnels where luggage is x-rayed, the agent performs his inspection. Using the backs of his hands he fellates my genitals. He traces the curves of my buttocks. With gentle karate chops, he investigates the taint. I start to laugh. I can’t help it.
It’s two days before the Oscars. Afterwards, the internet will fill up with posts about “humiliation rituals,” embarrassing spectacles inflicted on the famous for presumably occult purposes. This is one function of the spectacular: when John Cena is humiliated, a focal point is created in the information flow. Through it, we post about ourselves. Humiliation rituals seem to be the only rituals still standing.
I catch my flight. At the top of my backpack is an old paperback; a copy of Idoru by William Gibson. I bought it for a dollar at the Housing Works bookstore off of Houston Street, in the city, almost half a decade ago. Now I live elsewhere and Housing Works is closed, a victim of the pandemic. Gibson is describing Tokyo after a fiction near-future earthquake, rebuilding itself with nano-machines. He is describing a Japanese pop idol who is a sophisticated software construct. He is talking about a virtual world, layered over the real one, operating through a complex and anonymous protocol. He is telling me about a man who can ride currents of information like a kite being tossed by wind, making meaning out of credit histories and snippets of overheard conversation. This, says Mr. Gibson, is the future.
I look out the window of the plane. We climb into the clouds and stay there. Everything is gray. Streams of water cross the plexiglass. They are the only sign that we are moving.
Idoru is fine for a long plane-ride, but slightly disappointing. I used to get such a thrill from Gibson. In the 1990s, when I read him most intensely, the technological dystopia he described provided reliable shots of alienation: culture shock, spiritual downbeats, urban frission. His effect is lessened once you’ve read his sources: especially Future Shock by Alvin Toffler and Speed Tribes by Karl Taro Greenfeld. Last Summer, I was expounding to my friends about the theory behind a novel I spent three years trying (and failing) to write. One of them, a very intelligent young woman, informed me that all of its ideas were old — Toffler had been talking about them since the 1970s. Her recommendations led me down a trail of new books, depositing me here: thousands of feet in the air, traveling through a colorless rain storm, realizing as I turned the pages of my paperback that William Gibson’s primary innovation was bolting an indifferent thriller plot onto a cut-up of other people’s insights. God bless her and keep her. My reaction to Idoru, like the water in the windows, was an indication of speed. Death is stasis. Life moves.
We land at sunset. La Guardia has been redone; it’s a mall now. To get anywhere in it you have to climb a mountain of escalators and creep by a complex of storefronts too new to be trustworthy. I am desperate to escape. I have not taken nicotine in six hours. I make my way to the taxi dispatch. I’m placed in a car immediately.
I give the cabbie an address in Brooklyn. His vehicle reeks of tobacco. I explain to him my situation and ask if I can vape in his cab. He turns to me, silently lights a fat cigar, and shrugs. “It’s a free country,” he says. “What the hell do I care?”
New York.
That night, after dinner and a few (newly legal) spliffs, I go with friends to Bushwick. We go to a LAN center, a geek theme-bar with a large dance floor, a room of networked gaming computers used for e-sports events and a dedicated video mixing / streaming room. The DJs are good. People are dancing. Behind the stage, a massive screen displays an image of the performance being remixed and distorted in real time. Overlays of anime and virtual YouTubers come and go, while static expands like bacteria through the shifting patterns of the chroma key. The man handling the video sits in his room, down the hall from the dancers, performing his work with practiced efficiency. There’s so much vape smoke in his little studio that the bank of monitors around him have halos: pink and blue, orange and green. On his screens the dorks dance wildly. Limbs flail, heads piston on skinny necks. Women and men melt together, united in the blacklight into chimerical beings with too many legs and arms. Above them, on either side of the stage, additional screens feature live feeds of Twitch streamers playing fighting games. In the hallway between the dance floor and the bar, LCD posters blaze with propaganda. “YOU COULD BE MAKING 3K A MONTH,” they say. “START GAMING TODAY!”
This, then, is Gibson’s future. Technology and sex, a real world incomprehensible without a virtual overlay, consumer behaviors elevated to the level of the performing arts. It’s fun, undeniably. The crowd is enjoying itself and I am enjoying myself too. Beside the bar, the wall is papered with dissected issues of silver age Superman. A grisly image for a comic book collector. My mind is playing tricks on me. Surely the vodka doesn’t really taste like metal. How could it? The place is clean, far from a dive. There’s no way aluminum shavings would be permissible under the health code… but there it is, all the same: an aftertaste.
Strange consequences of a technological society: futures arrive old enough to drink. For thirty years pop-culture anticipated the cyberpunk and now that it’s here it feels prehistoric, beside the point, oddly nostalgic. When the features of culture have been thoroughly anticipated its arrival produces no shock. Gibson’s thriller mechanics are wholly absent, too. The only danger at the rave that night was danger to the CGC ratings of old issues of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane. A society awash in digital information isn’t all secret plots and hidden intelligences. Most of it, as it turns out, is trivia. Gaming lore, foreign cartoons, esoteric button combinations. But it’s no time for deep thinking. The bass drives, the girls dance, the lights pulse and shimmer in the blackness. I smoke another spliff, burn a Marlboro and vanish, my signal fuzzing into sensational noise. I’m in bed by three a.m..
I am in the city to leave it. The next day, at nine a.m., my friends and I head upstate to a cabin in the Catskills. It belongs to one of them, who we’ll call Lane. Lane bought his land years ago and he’s been developing it ever since, creating a paradisal second home for himself, his wife and their two nearly-teenage children.
Once we arrive, we take the tour. There’s a half-cylinder hanger of corrugated metal in one clearing, surrounded by ancient pines and cedars. Here are his tools: a winch for logging, a shelf of chainsaws, endless engines and drills. A rusted go cart, sized for children. Down the footpath from there is the cabin itself. It has canvas walls and a full roof. It sleeps four. There is a couch, shelving, a small coffee table. There is an outdoor kitchen, complete with shower. There is a propane powered refrigerator. Rainwater is collected, filtered and stored in a watershed attached to the rear of the building. Appliances are powered by Makita battery packs affixed with cheap Chinese adapters which turn them into LED lamps or USB charging stations. Down another footpath there is a compost toilet and an additional shower. Further along, a small cabin for the kids has been constructed. They decorated it themselves. One wall has a hand-drawn poster in its center: “SAVE ANIMALS.” Beyond that, running along the property line, is a wall of stacked stones first constructed in the eighteenth century. The trees on Lane’s land have come and gone; by the beginning of the 1800s they’d been logged to extinction. Once railroads allowed timber to be shipped from the midwest, they were replanted. They grew throughout the nineteenth century and the twentieth until the land looks as it does now: deep woods, tree succeeding tree until the trunks vanish in the green distance. It’s easy to forget that the oldest thing on the property is that waist-high wall of stones.
Lane would like to live at his cabin full-time, but there’s problems. To qualify as a residence, zoning laws dictate he have a driveway leading all the way up to the abode, with ample space for emergency vehicles to turn around. Right now all he has is a gravel footpath. One parks near the road and ferries supplies back and forth from car to cabin with a small garden tractor. This system works fine, and Lane is loathe to clear more trees than he has already. The law says he must also have a septic system and a well, neither of which he needs. He is in the odd position of petitioning his local government for the permission to live with less. Most of their regulations are designed to lessen “environmental impacts.” Lane’s cabin falls short of them because it is not impactful enough. He finds the irony maddening. He also finds it maddening that this community, founded by homesteaders in the eighteenth century, is unwilling to abide a frontier homestead in the twenty-first.
We stay the night. It snows, but we’re boiling in the warmth of the wood-stove. There’s a cellular connection, of course. We smoke cigarettes and listen to a German man playing droning kraut-rock in a Berlin train station, the time and distance between us collapsed by satellites.
The future, I suspect, is something more or less like Lane’s cabin. Our twenty-first century angsts are, for the most part, problems of abundance. We are overloaded with information, with propaganda, with clashing narratives and social demands. Our very poor are morbidly obese because the cheapest and most available foods are calorie-dense chemical constructs. Drugs are too available and too effective. Sex pulsates in the air, reduced to the electrical impulses of matchmaking and porn. For most of human history the challenge has been getting enough to live on. For Americans in the twenty-first century, the opposite problem predominates.
Political extremism is enjoying a heyday because it is a very effective means of controlling information overload. Extremism, whether right or left, throttles the ceaseless flow of data by branding huge swaths of it enemy propaganda. Extremism narrows our empathy to members of a chosen group. The twenty fist-century extremist is able to stand up, even beneath a deluge of narratives and demands, because the extremist is brutal about the information they allow themselves to internalize. This is extremism of a very slippery kind; I don’t see many people willing to die for it, but I see a lot of people practicing it in a casual way. It won’t even be right to call it extremism in a few years. Aggressive rejection of incoming information and living in a heavily curated mental dictatorship is fast replacing the old consensus culture. All of us are headed to upstate cabins of our own: novel ways of living, enabled by technology, wherein we may exercise absolute dominion over the landscape. Small houses, nomadic caravans, roommate collectives. The expansive “American dream” of the suburban home and the thirty-year job has withered. Our new dreams are fast and elusive — but they, like their predecessors, are dreams of freedom.
Kennedy’s new frontier was a space of collective action: its interests were social, political, scientific. Our twenty-first century “new frontiers” are predicated on a rejection of the collective. Our future will be defined not by the leadership of Presidents or businessmen but rather by radical self-interest, practiced at scale.
On the way back to the city, we stopped in to visit a writer and ventriloquist I knew from the old days. It was with him that I bought Idoru at Housing Works. The ventriloquist has a townhouse upstate, not far from the cabin. There, he excitedly showed off his latest aquisition: an Edison Diamond Disc Player. Unlike the phonograph, its primary competitor, the Edison machine had a needle that never wore out. A diamond needle. My friends and I watched while he retrieved one of the large, sturdy Edison discs from its paper sleeve. He put it on the turntable and placed the needle. The amplifying horn atop the stylus began to crackle. Then: music. A dance tune, little more than a century old.
The Edison Diamond Disc was expensive, permanent and high quality. It was the betamax of the 1920s. These days it doesn’t pay to bet on permanence. Our wisdom is the wisdom of the shuttering store, the vanishing Office Max, the gutted Best Buy: “Everything must go.”
Our situation is not wholly novel. We’ve been living in a society defined by rapid technological change since the growth of mechanized industry more than two centuries ago. What is new is that we’re getting used to it: not to any one specific technology, but to the whole destabilizing pattern of technology itself.
We have a good visit with the ventriloquist. Soon, it’s time to go. We pack up the car and slide away, gliding down highways while we listen to Strawberry Switchblade. We pass something as we speed through the Hudson Valley: a totem Lane finds disgusting. It’s a cellphone tower covered in green astroturf, clumsily made up to resemble a tree. But there’s no mistaking it: green as it is, it bulges with functional rectangles and crawls with insectoid antennas.
“They do that because homeowners complain,” Lane tells me. “They don’t want a cellphone tower messing up their view. What’s really terrible is that they’re okay with that horrible camouflage. It’s an insult to nature. That thing clearly didn’t grow.”
I agree with him. There’s something blasphemous about the grassy tower. It’s a lie; a fantasy.
Soon the city appears in the distance: glass trapezoids leaking, like spilled mercury, into a silvery sky.