Dear John

Lately, I've been wondering when my social life underwent the sea change that resulted in what it is now, an overcomplicated, delicately balanced, globalized cybernetic pixeldrome of blogs, browsers, pop-ups, cookies, and social media precariously dependent on broadband, WiFi and a power supply. I’ve got friends in Egypt and India and England and Greece, but few, if any, in the city in which I live. Without a laptop or a smartphone or a tablet or a router, I’m isolated. Luckily, I'm married to a woman with whom I share a vibrant conviviality. A woman who, in today's world, I would never have met. The circumstances in which we met were nourished by a local community of poets and artists who all lived within the same geographical location. There was a time when I enjoyed a very robust social network here at home. What happened? Not entirely sure, but Covid played a big role, and lockdowns, and mandates, and restaurant waiters behaving like police. Suddenly, we found ourselves conducting our social activity on sites like Zoom, in which we stared at one another on laptop screens, be it a friendly chat, visit with a doctor, or artistic performance. Visits to the outer world required a vaccine passport, social distancing and a mask. Every individual was a potential grenade of pathogens. Much of these restrictions have been lifted, at least temporarily, but word of biolabs in Ukraine give one pause.

This undoing of the agora had been building for some time. The erosion of the social domain began before the pandemic. The transition was gradual. It began with email, sometime in 1999, at venues outside our home. We were slow to get a computer. We began sending hastily written messages on one of many computers set up in a local internet café which also hosted poetry readings. The messages were hasty because we were trying to hammer out a brief message minutes before a reading. Then, unexpectedly one afternoon, my dad showed up with a computer he wanted to give us. He’d bought a new computer and thought he’d give us his old one. A family relation – a man with a background in physics – helped set it up. The complications in operating, maintaining, and deciphering this electronic beast were dizzying, but it allowed us to contact people within seconds, a process that ended a lifetime of crafting letters – handwritten or typed – sticking them in an envelope and entrusting them to the postal service and waiting for a reply that might come within days or weeks or months. I always loved writing letters, I loved the informality of it, the cordial access it afforded to warmly and sociably hone my skills as a writer.

But then I noticed a change. The messages I began receiving in response to my letters were often hastily written. There was something about the medium that invited brevity. The messages were just that: messages. With a few notable exceptions, for which I was deeply appreciative, there were no rhetorical flourishes, no issues explored, no excitements shared, no real personality, just blunt information slammed together in a couple of sentences. I don’t know why this had to be the case. There were no restrictions on word count. Twitter was years away. Social media wasn’t even on the horizon. Why had people – many of them writers and editors – suddenly decided to refrain from more expansive communications and chosen to express themselves so casually, so nonchalantly?

The new medium hadn’t altered my letter writing at all. I wrote detailed accounts, did my best to craft well-constructed sentences, and disseminate ideas while simultaneously distilling their expression. Was this an irritation to the others? Too windy? Too wordy? Too woolly? Did email provide a liberating excuse for the non-development of thought? Was it a matter of technology, or was something else afoot, something curdling in the zeitgeist like sour milk? I didn’t challenge anyone. No point in that. I’m alienated enough as it is. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as a pariah with no one to write to at all. And then it hit me: time. People don’t have time. They have glut. There’s a glut of information, data, opinion, instruction, directions, spreadsheets, stochastic modeling, updates, conferences, rundowns, meetings, bulletins, publicity, hot stories, warnings, prophecies, algorithms and smoking guns.

People were drowning in a tsunami of information. That offered one sound explanation, albeit a disheartening one. Commerce was winning. Culture was dying. There’d been a major shift in the paradigm. You could see it in the cold glass and steel designs of the new buildings. In the ultramodern botanical gardens contained within Jeff Bezos’s balls in downtown Seattle.

But these were surface effects, symptoms of a deeper problem that began stewing in the anti-intellectual cauldrons of puritan New England in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. You heard the word ‘pragmatism’ a lot. The obsession with tools had reached a zenith. Where was the resistance?

Heidegger pointed to the hammer and said the more we seize hold of it and use it the more primordial does our relationship to it become. He also said that the essence of technology is not anything technological. Technology embodies a specific way of revealing the world. Modern technology is a “forcing into being.” It reveals the world as raw material, available for production and manipulation. Technology, run amok, has distorted our approach to the world. We inhabit it as a place to control and manipulate. The danger here is to begin to see ourselves as resources – human resources – for the plundering of its materials. It leads to enslavement.

By the time the new century rolled around I could see the writing on the wall. The new technology unleashed on the world would decimate the written word, print media, investigative journalism, novels and bookstores. Seattle still has bookstores, but they’re so hollowed out and bereft of actual books they’re more like tchotchke shops aimed at sleepy tourists from one of the leviathan cruise ships anchored at Pier 91. Coffee mugs, Husky T-shirts, and stacks of Dan Brown.  

It’s painful to see something you valued destroyed. But there it is. There’s been a war on the written word and the writers are losing. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 turned out to be prophetic.

A few months ago I happened to be rummaging in a box of old letters, many of them dating from the mid to late 60s and written by friends in their late teens. I had quite a few written by a girlfriend who was sixteen at the time. Her letters are wonderful, full of excitement and character, lively descriptions and beautifully constructed sentences. The difference between what was written then and what is written now is separated by light years of quality, a time when education was genuine and not everything had yet been captured by a corporate juggernaut serving Mammon, the art of reading and writing dislodged by pop-up videos, sloppy grammar and gross inattention. And when, in conversation or sharing an opinion on social media, one didn’t have to walk on eggshells. People didn’t clutch their pearls or explode when you said something a little contrary, a little eccentric, a little risqué.

I like to think of a paragraph as a framework filled with fireflies and jewels. A seismograph for the little tremors in a society that has gone to sleep. The jiggle of thought juggled in a drum of prepositions. A gallimaufry of cork and corduroy. A fireside burning logarithms into sparks of perspicacity, the pale smoke of thought rising out of a chimney of stone and moss. And send that letter to Mr. John Keats, residing in heaven with nightingales, Bordeaux claret and Madame de Sévigné.