The Future is an Empty Room

Our Bleak Future is Written in the Stars

“Glory be to God for dappled things … All things counter, original, spare, strange…”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Sorry, Star Trek fans: There’s not going to be any manned interstellar travel in the near or far future. And there won’t be any teleportation or alien encounters, either. What there will be, as digital technology consolidates its conquest of the known universe, is space. Lots and lots of empty space.

It turns out that Star Trek was right about the future all along, at least in one small regard: It’s an empty room.

True, the TV series and movie franchise have gotten, or eventually are going to get, nearly all the big things wrong. Indeed, at some point in the far-distant future, if people still remember this moldy slice of sci-fi cheese from the ancient past, they’re likely to note ruefully how few of its grand visions ever were realized.

For example, faster-than-light-speed interstellar travel and the teleportation of humans probably will never happen. Because of the incredible distances involved, we most likely won’t ever visit other planets outside of our solar system in manned spacecraft. Nor will manned (or “aliened”) spacecraft likely ever visit ours.

But while it got the physics and engineering all wrong, Star Trek at least got the interior decoration part exactly right. Whenever the crew of the Enterprise retires for the night, their quarters are as cold and sterile as a surgical theatre or semiconductor manufacturing facility. With the exception of the fabulous views of Rigil Kentaurus visible through the “transparent aluminum” windows, and a few artifacts spirited away from that memorable shore leave on Argellius II, the bedrooms, “captain’s ready room”, and galaxy-class galleys hold hardly any visual interest at all.

And the rare terrestrial residences we see are just as bland, so we know the emptiness is not just a function of the lack of space in space.

It should be noted that, for practical reasons, furnishing a room from the future would be an expensive nightmare for prop masters, who would not only have to imagine what a 24th century bookshelf might look like, but would actually have to create it and stock it with plausibly futuristic tomes.

But it’s also possible that the art directors and prop masters of the recent past (the first season of Star Trek appeared in 1966) intuited that bookshelves would no longer exist in the distant future, either because they assumed the future would be more “streamlined”, or because they already knew that most of the physical manifestations of contemporary culture, including books, would soon be converted to digital form.

To state the obvious, books, DVDs, CDs, box sets, magazines, newspapers, letters, family photos, children’s artwork, board games, wedding albums, scrapbooks, prints, paintings, maps, brochures, journals, recipe binders, newsletters, logs, diaries, catalogues, televisions, radios, and devices for playing recorded music, along with many other items that have long furnished our homes, are already in the process of being digitally obliterated, so the likelihood of them existing in the near or far future is nil.

This destruction is accelerating at a pace that’s faster than even our science fiction scenarists could have imagined. We’re not even close to the 24th century, but already DVD sales are slithering down the same digital hole that swallowed the CD, the daily paper is close to being pulped, and the printed book is beginning to feel a cold chill running down its spine.

All of these media are being replaced by a single cool, impassive, and implacable delivery system: the screen. According to a recent study conducted on behalf of the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence, we now spend between 8-1/2 to 9-1/2 hours a day gazing at a screen, whether of the television, computer, e-reader, or smart phone variety, and no one is predicting that this rather stunning number is likely to decrease any time soon.

But there was nothing startlingly prescient about Star Trek. After all, the very instant — a couple of decades before the series was conceived — that the first piece of information was digitized into a bit stream, the inevitable victory of digital over analogue was already written in the stars. Because virtually every form of visual or aural information can be converted to a digital format, that initial “1” and “0” carried in it the seeds of a barren future, not unlike the manner in which those first fissile atoms under the squash courts at the University of Chicago portended the destruction of entire cities and atolls.

We take for granted that we live in an environment that is rich and varied and endlessly stimulating. But that richness is beginning to fade to white. And it isn’t happening only inside the walls of our homes: What, for example, will be the purpose of a library when, not too many years from now, every book ever written will be instantly accessible on one of the screens that we will hold before our eyes at every turn?

A recent Bizarro cartoon by Dan Piraro depicts the façade of the New York Public Library with a new sign, “Museum of the Internet – Formerly the New York Public Library”, and one imagines the empty, echoing halls containing only a bank of featureless screens, which in any event, could just as easily be located in patron’s homes, or in their side pockets.

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A streetscape without bookstores (which are already beginning to fray around the edges); record stores; music stores; newsstands; newspaper boxes; stacks of free newspapers and city guides; magazine stores; comic book stores; greeting card and stationery shops; video rental stores; videogame stores; Internet cafes; photo shops; libraries; and some art galleries, art fairs, and museums may not be a bleak one. Undoubtedly, other kinds of stores will rise up to fill the void (yet another bank branch, for example, and, uh, maybe a new wave of frozen yogurt shops).

But it will be a radically different one, and the rapidity with which the cultural wealth of our recent past is being steamrolled by a shinier and more-efficient set of technologies must give even the most committed of technophorics pause.

We Sold Our Souls for a Turkey Sandwich

We Sold Our Souls for a Turkey Sandwich

Interestingly, there was an earlier, equally radical, and also technology-driven alteration of our urban environment beginning in the years immediately after World War II. In the US it was called “urban renewal”, and from the moment the first spadeful of earth was turned for the first grand civic project, it was greeted with glorious hosannas.

Using a combination of eminent domain, legislative fiat, tax incentives, and forced population transfers, urban planners constructed futuristic housing developments and sleek shopping areas that replaced old ethnic neighborhoods from Singapore to Paris to Dublin to Chicago.

Some of the obliterated areas were fragrant and rich in culture, and others were dilapidated and malodorous, but it is indisputable that historic buildings, blocks, farmers markets, and entire Little Italy’s, Jewish Quarters, Greektowns, and Chinatowns, complete with restaurants, commercial buildings, small family-owned shops, and irreplaceable family homes, many featuring unique and richly ornamented architecture, were, in a matter of days, reduced to dust.

In the countryside, an analogous process plowed under some of the world’s most fertile farmland and the songbirds and creatures that dwelled in its margins, only to be replaced with sprawling shopping malls, housing developments, and expressways, the better to connect the new urban centers with each other. Some of this development was badly needed, and some was horrifically ill-conceived, but in either case, much of our unique and indigenous culture was steamrolled, paved, asphalted, and macadamed to death.

All of this struck home for me a few years back, when I spent a couple of days on business in the downtown area of a medium-large American city that had, after several waves of urban renewal, lost any semblance of its former self as a vibrant Mississippi River boomtown. Most of its old buildings had long since been flattened in favor of the kind of sleek corporate headquarters that have, depending on the architect, either brightened or blighted many American cities; others had been razed for parking lots or for new sports stadiums and temporarily fashionable condos and housing complexes.

For better or worse (and some of the new buildings were indeed beautiful) the city now looked like any of a hundred other American cities, its original and indigenous character irretrievably lost. Like the wood rat (aka “pack rat”) of legend that steals shiny bits of jewelry and replaces them with twigs or pebbles, something beautiful had been stolen, and something else vaguely characterless and ersatz had been left behind.

It was a raw and windy couple of days, and the fact that the downtown area was nearly deserted seemed to make the streets that much colder and more sterile. Before heading to the airport, I ducked into a local deli for dinner. As I entered, I could see a large cubbyholed wall stacked with one-gallon jars of bread and butter pickles, banana peppers, giardiniera, pickled cauliflower, calamata olives, giant green olives, cherry peppers, pickled onions, jalapenos, artichoke hearts, and hearts of palm.

It was a scintillating vision.

So I ordered a turkey and Swiss sandwich and asked for some spicy giardiniera on it, and some Greek olives on the side.

“No can do,” the clerk behind the counter told me. “Those are just for decoration.” I objected, but resistance was futile: It was “corporate policy.”

Those jars had dwelt there, unopened, for years.

So I consumed a tasteless sandwich with deli meat that might as well have been dematerialized from its original corporeal incarnation, then reconstituted by means of a matter replicator as “turkey” and combined with a splurt of mustard and a simulacrum of Swiss, and hailed a taxi to the airport.

But there was something grotesque and depressing about that fake deli that might well have been built on the site of a long-ago actual deli owned by the area’s original German immigrants (just as housing developments named, for example, “Fair Oaks”, have inevitably bulldozed an old stand of oak trees to make room for the parking lot), and of the image of those colorful condiments trapped behind glass, so close and yet so far away. It has remained with me all of these years as a fitting symbol of how technology has created a culture that is more tantalizingly accessible, and yet more distant and lacking in savor and flavor, than ever before.

Of course, digital culture is only distantly analogous to urban renewal, in part because many of those post-war housing complexes, having been deemed to be unlivable, have themselves long since been torn down. But in both cases, new technologies were enthusiastically embraced, and the old ones too quickly consigned to the past.

The point is that the old neighborhoods and landmark buildings that were destroyed to make room for the new buildings are gone forever. So too, I fear, are many of the elements of our culture that digitization is either wittingly or unwittingly wiping out. Precious parts of our civilization are being ground into digital dust, and we will never get them back.

We Will Be Assimilated. Resistance is Futile.

We Will Be Assimilated. Resistance is Futile.

At some level, the question of whether digitization is adding to or subtracting from our culture’s sum total of diversity is absurd: The Internet and other digital worlds cut through previously unbreachable barriers of space and time, store infinite amounts of information, retrieve that information instantaneously, slice and dice it in myriad ways that satisfy our most idiosyncratic interests, provide access to virtually any object or idea ever conceived by the human mind, preserve fragile documents from the past, display global culture in all of its richness and diversity, and help us connect in a truly democratic mind-meld and near the speed of light with virtually anyone else on the planet seated behind a screen of their own.

Put it another way: Digitization allows us not only to replicate what we once experienced only in print or analogue form, but also gives us an almost miraculous array of advantages that are immeasurably beyond analogue’s grasp (such as, to take one small example, the ability to instantly access, search, link to and from, store, and comment on stories in an online newspaper).

But there is a gargantuan difference between what we are now capable of experiencing and what we actually experience – and a similarly vast gulf between the stunningly rapid growth in sophistication of digital technology and the painfully sad degeneration of our digitized arts and culture.

I am not referring here only to the relatively trivial contrast between the surgical sterility of the screen and of the rooms where we soon will live, when compared to the texture and the plentitude of a physical environment cluttered with books and magazines and records. Indeed, the growing poverty of our visual environment would almost be acceptable if the “content” (what a detestable word!) delivered by all those screens were concomitantly richer.

But it is not. It is correspondingly poorer. The effect of digital technologies (and here I’m not referring solely to the Internet) on the quality of our arts has been disastrous, blenderizing and pureeing the original, the authentic, and the indigenous into a kind of flavorless digital slurry.

How is this possible? How can a technology that not only faithfully replicates the analogue, but also improves on it in countless ways, at the same time be so blandly destructive?

Consider music. For years, the commercial wisdom has been that digitization not only replicates the original, it also makes it better. But in actuality, it makes it “better”. The bright, shiny sound of CDs was temporarily “better” than LPs – until people started to tire of the brittle cases and brittle tone. MP3s, with their incredible storage capacity and convenience, are similarly “better” than CDs, and, at the same time, with their tinny sound, much worse. (Playing MP3s on expensive stereo systems helps, in the sense that it gets us back to pretty much where we were with LPs to begin with.)

In short, the newness of each technological advance dazzles us into believing that music sounds better than before when in fact it is inferior. At the risk of stating the obvious, actual music is, and always has been, analogue. Whereas digitally reproduced music, like a teleported object, has been subjected to a process of dematerialization and rematerialization and thus is a reconstituted simulacrum of the original, often with a few bits missing.

Eventually, of course, the sound of MP3s will become genuinely better, but the music itself is another matter. To cite only one example of its deleterious effect on creativity, consider how infinitely easier it is with digital tools to make mash-ups, smash-ups, samples, compilations, re-mixes, re-edits, parodies, and pastiches.

All of them interesting, and a great deal of fun. And all of them an inferior form of creativity.

One more example, out of what could be dozens: The eerie sameness of contemporary music within each acknowledged genre, as automatic pitch correction and incredibly sophisticated sound-mixing creates soulless music with a perfect and unearthly sheen.

To be sure, literary culture is an entirely different matter than music, given that the issues of digital degradation and recombination are vastly less problematic when the end result is merely words on a page.

While neither of the two e-readers I’ve tried out, the Kindle and the Sony Reader, are as miraculous a feat of engineering as the I-Phone, nonetheless they are beautiful pieces of technology, and reading any given page on one of these devices isn’t much different from reading the same page in a printed book.

I’ll buy one or the other of these devices at some point in the next year, simply because the magnetic force they exert is irresistible. In an ideal world, my shiny new Kindle, and whatever more-advanced Kindle inevitably succeeds it, would sit on the coffee table for decades to come, right next to a stack of glossy magazines and beautiful hardcovers and glossy paperbacks.

Unfortunately, in the “real” (which is to say, unreal and digital) world, we don’t have the luxury of decades. It’s very soon going to be either e-readers or printed books, and it almost certainly won’t be the books that survive.

The essential problem is that there is no compromising with digital technology, no appeasement that ever succeeds. Borg-like, technology takes one galactic quadrant after another until one day you look up and the merciless metallic hordes are gathered on the horizon, waiting to strike. LPs co-existed with CDs for, oh, about fifteen minutes, and CDs will continue to co-exist with MP3s for another five minutes or so. (The fact that CDs are themselves digital is irrelevant; in every case, digitization eventually reduces itself to a non-tangible manifestation.)

After that, all will be assimilated. We’ll be all digital, all the time.

Mind-numbing Variety

Mind-numbing Variety

With that depressing vision in mind, let me lay out a more-specific scenario for the e-reader that portends the imminent demise of the printed book.

First, most people would agree with my perception that, on a page-by-page basis, e-readers are “just as good as” printed books (with the rather significant exception of photos and artwork.)

Next, encouraged by Amazon’s and Sony’s relentless marketing, and by the fact that every third person on the commuter train or airplane is using an e-reader, the average person starts to feel that the printed book in his hands is slightly shabby-looking, dog eared, declasse (in the same way that people began to shift their LPs to a shelf in the basement because those squares of cardboard looked so big and awkward next to those shiny new CDs.)

Next, increasingly inexpensive download prices will encourage people not only to buy e-readers but to load them up with all of the books on their reading list that they haven’t had time yet to purchase and won’t ever have time to read. And newspapers. And magazines. In one sense, the variety available to the individual reader will be mind-numbing.

In another sense, it will be, well, mind-numbing.

New technology certainly makes previously obscure selections infinitely more available, but that’s quite a bit different from saying we will avail ourselves of them. With so much so readily available all at once, everything – good, bad, and indifferent – will be blenderized into an indistinguishable mush. Indistinguishable, that is, except in the cases of those works that are most heavily publicized, and that most readily pander.

Of course, not everyone will download only the aggressively promoted few and leave the rest to languish. But statistically speaking, it is almost inevitable that most of us will, in a manner of speaking, stare dully at all of the colorful and delicious peppers lined up behind the glass, sigh deeply, and settle for the turkey.

Some e-book adopters, whether of the easily sated or insatiably curious variety, will never look back at the traditional book. They will enthusiastically embrace not only the e-reader itself, but its effect on traditional publishing, gloating about those publishing industry “executives, managers, and editors…stuck with their heads in a wad of paper, with ink running through their veins…stuck in a Gutenberg rut,” as one blogger ever-so-charmingly put it. (When did it become acceptable for presumably sophisticated advocates of advanced technology to crow like Cossacks over the villages they’ve just destroyed?)

In other cases, after a brief period of infatuation, readers will begin to realize that “just as good as” isn’t, in fact, as good as, in the same way that we all discovered that Country Time powder, for example, isn’t as good as real lemonade. The unvaried look and feel and flatness of their monocular library will begin to pall, as will the sheer fatigue of reading from a screen.

Anyone who has torn himself away in bleary-eyed weariness from too many hours spent in front of a computer screen will know the feeling: The sensation of looking up at the sky and remembering, with a sense of being admonished and surprised, that what begins in purity inevitably ends in contempt, and that the exhausting glare and anomie of the screen and its indiscriminate and overwhelming content is not all there is: There is still a world out there.

Those readers who do in fact get tired of the e-reader will toss their device into the basement with all of the other electronic junk that never worked properly, all the frozen I-pods and obsolete computers and embarrassing FM Walkmen and good-for-a-laugh eight-track tape players and dead docking stations. But having already downloaded dozens or hundreds of books, they’re not likely to go out and buy the hardcover or paperback editions of the same works. Instead, the books will remain forever, unread, in electronic limbo.

Soon enough, another generation of e-readers will come along, and these will be better, or at least “better”, and the skeptical reader, rather than “go backwards” by buying real books again, will use the money instead to invest in the new generation of technology.

Early embracers and skeptics alike, all will have made the stylistic and psychological commitment to reading e-books rather than books, so the latter will remain un-bought, and as soon as the economics begin to tilt decisively against the printed word, we will begin to see the first national bestsellers issued in an electronic-only format.

And there you have it: The book, that crowning cultural achievement that is one of the chief glories of our civilization, is dead. Even if e-readers ends up fading in popularity after a decade or two, the book will still be dead, and, perhaps, reading itself with it.

(Here’s a worrisome indicator: Most people have noticed how difficult it is to read long texts, and even long paragraphs, on the Internet. If this becomes an issue with e-readers as well, it will subtly influence even our most literate authors to write dumbed-down sentences and paragraphs, and that, in turn, will make reading less pleasurable for everyone.)

But this is all a worst-case scenario. Maybe, instead, real printed books will remain alive in the sense that LPs are alive, as nothing more than a niche interest for obsessive collectors.

Hey, cool, whatever.

Feel Like Committing Cultural Suicide? We Have an App for That.

Feel Like Committing Cultural Suicide? We Have an App for That.

Unfortunately, these issues are exceedingly difficult to talk about in a public forum, thanks to “the Watson Effect”. Many years ago, the chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson, infamously opined that “there is a world market for maybe five computers.” As spectacularly wrong predictions go, you couldn’t do much better than that. And ever since, people have been terrified, when talking about technology, of appearing similarly foolish to future generations – even though the sum total of foolishness is probably equally divided between the advocates (yes, there really were once websites that sold you only socks, or pet food, online) and the skeptics.

But there’s a huge, and perhaps understandable, difference between the two groups. The advocates, as they must, speak up, or what’s the point of being an advocate? A visionary without a voice is nothing at all. But the skeptics, though they also must speak, too often do not. Thus, in the wake of every loud new product announcement, there is little left but an echoing silence, even as the successive waves of these new devices are burying parts of our cultural heritage alive.

Another part of what makes it so hard to speak up in defense of print media is that digitization has all the bases covered. In the case of newspapers, for example, it’s easy to see that “the market has spoken” because advertisers are indeed pulling out of print so definitively in favor of less-expensive and more-targeted advertising on the Internet, and because enterprises such as Google and Yahoo have been so phenomenally successful, even as century-old print franchises slide into insolvency.

But the same time, digital media is able to adopt the stance of the rebel, employing creative guerilla tactics against the monolithic and arrogant “mainstream media.” (The fact that the mainstream media has indeed been arrogant doesn’t help a bit, and it’s also true that the majority of online publications have to scramble to collect enough ad revenue to pay the bills.) It’s a neat trick: Digital media entrepreneurs somehow have become the fat and happy capitalists and the rebels with the weird sideburns all at once.

Add to this the fact that some who question certain aspects of digitization’s relentless advance are likely to be branded, unthinkingly, as a Luddite (not that there aren’t some actual Luddites out there) and it’s a wonder that anyone says anything at all.

Lately, even as lovers of the traditional book bury their noses in the latest volume while the world shifts around them, the proponents of new technology have been bellowing more loudly than ever. It reminds me, a bit, of those scenes in old black and white movies where an excitable farmer is seen shouting into his wall-mounted crank telephone. Why is he shouting? Because he thinks he has to “help” his voice go those long distances to that farm on the other side of the county.

Up until a year or two ago, everyone seemed to be shouting into their cell phones as well, until they realized, almost all at the same time, that the person at the other end of the line can hear you just as well when you murmur, or speak in a normal tone of voice. There are far fewer arguments on our commuter trains these days as a result.

Digitization is still, I suspect, in the shouting stage, that point where people are infatuated and intimidated by the newness of the technology without really understanding its long-term effect on our society and culture, nor how impactful it can be at normal volumes.

What do I consider to be a “normal volume”? I consider it to be a cultural conversation in which print and digital both participate, and in which the value of each is readily acknowledged, even as the shortcomings of each are frankly discussed.

It means embracing digitization for its manifold wonders and miracles, while gently pointing out that it can contribute in some cases to a culture that is ersatz, freeze-dried, over-engineered, deracinated, overly perfected, and cloned.

It means using your e-reader for perusing, say, business books and heavy textbooks and frequently updated technical journals. It means taking it along on lengthy trips, and using it in low-light conditions. Actually, it means using it for whatever the hell you want to use it for – as long as you continue to keep in mind what it is that makes books so wonderful to hold and to read, and distribute your dollars accordingly.

Flannery O’Connor? There’s a sleek and beautiful Library of America edition for her. Saul Bellow looks best in an Everyman’s Library edition — you know, the ones with the cool satin bookmarks. Elmore Leonard? He’s perfect in a real, live paperback. That oversized book of Matisse cut-outs? It just ain’t the same on the pages of an e-book.

Ideally, it shouldn’t be difficult at all for the digital and paper worlds to co-exist. Consider, for example, what the publisher of my first novel ENC Press, is doing (Cherry Whip , 2004). ENC is employing all of the resources of the online world to build its nascent business – Twitter, discussion boards, online-only ordering that bypasses the sclerotic old distribution systems, Facebook fan pages – but, at the end of the day, delivering an actual, tangible, three-dimensional book to your actual, tangible front door.

So can print and digital indeed co-exist? Honestly, though the odds are against it happening, I think it is in the interests of our civilization to give it a try.

To say, finally, “the book stops here.”

In a recent episode of House, a middle-aged-man and his daughter are diagnosed by the irascible Doctor House with anhedonia, or the inability to experience pleasure, after he notes that their house is empty of decorations and books.

I thought that diagnosis was spot on. I consider the clutter created by books and records and magazines and newspapers – but books in particular – as being very much in the same category as the clutter created by children, pets, plants, food, photographs, and art, which is to say: Not clutter at all, but signs of pleasure and happiness and life.

Or, as Robert Louis Stevenson put it, in a verse I remember vividly from my childhood, “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

I encountered this little poem in a hardcover book, originally published before my birth, titled Poems of Early Childhood, as part of a series called Childcraft. All of the volumes in the series had bright, bumpy orange covers with engraved illustrations, and, in our family at least, yellowing pages with purplish jelly stains. My parents read these wonderful books to me, and I had the good sense to rescue some of them from my childhood home, so that now I read the same poems to my own daughter.

I expect her to save these books for her children, too, even if they need to be re-stitched and re-bound. The prospect that she might, instead, choose to read to them from a smooth screen, in a barren room without bookshelves or board games, is deeply saddening.

But there’s no reason why this prospect should ever come to pass. At the level of individual choice, I hope and perhaps unreasonably suspect that we will not in effect go backwards by uncritically and unfailingly choosing the two-dimensional over the three-dimensional every time and for every purpose. Let us, instead, be capable of acknowledging technology for both its benefits and its failings, while continuing to wholeheartedly embrace a part of our culture that has brought light and delight into our lives for the past 500 years – the printed book.