Text and Hubris

I had planned on eating my lunch in the park yesterday, but the rain put an end to that. Instead, I wandered downstairs and look for a seat in the work cafeteria. It still amazes how much like high school this place is. Here, I am a youngster. Most of my colleagues are in their 40′s and yet there are the managers sitting at one table, the go-getters at another, and the social butterflies at yet another. I note this as further evidence that the social divisions of a nation, a school, and a workplace are all the same.

With that cheerful thought in mind, I almost think of tossing my meal and heading upstairs. I think it would be easier than to watch this. I am hungry, though, and I can’t will myself to throw away food simply due to my own frustration. I sit at a table far removed from the rest, pull my sandwich out of the brown paper bag I’ve been carrying with me and commence eating.

They all talk at once. I listen and I watch and I catalog a hundred conversations about nothing. Jim is ranting about politics, George rambles on about his ongoing home repairs while Angie and Chad are whispering in the back almost too conspiratorially considering they are both married and not to each other. This latter issue would count as gossip here. I can already see the social butterflies, more vampires than butterflies, watching closely.

I know I should get up and leave. Upstairs there is nothing to do but log into the same systems and do the same thing I have been doing. The new technology has left us behind. Now, I work on 10 yr. old platforms that just won’t die. Now, I watch high school politics play out in a nearly empty cafeteria that used to house hundreds.

This is my life.

And yet, there is always that whisper in my ear. That echo that says,

“It doesn’t have to be…”

I was feeling nostalgic so here we go. This is a throw back to what the Greyrealm and Text and Hubris used to look like. Sometimes, simple is best.

What to do, what to do? I sit here and stare at my future. I have three papers to write and all I can do is ponder how to merge them all into a new media narrative. I feel so far behind and yet, in some ways, I am still ahead. My goals are coalescing. New Media narratives can and do exist but only by accepting that we cannot hold on to the paradigms of the past. That includes the paradigms of the the Internet.

New Media is not youtube, it is not the Gutenberg Project, or Google’s mad dash to digitize all text. Text exists within and without. Narratives are human creations and we now live inside and outside of the machine. Inside the machine the world is only slivers of grey. This is the Greyrealm that has hosted me for so long. Beyond the realms of that are only illusions and vast tracts of advertising. Narratives exist in between. They exist in the colleague who tells me of a dwarf who stands against the horde. They exist in a boy who delights in telling me how so silly tripe changed his mind and in the many shared laughs caused by that cursed narwhal song. They are teh reason that a crappy boy band from – what was it, Moldova – will be forever remembered for one really annoying song. New Media is the narrative of life and in that it is no different from the narratives of the past. The only real difference is that more people are talking and more tales are being told and the giants of old media are doing whatever they can to make money while the giant corporations of new media prepare to devour their forefathers.

Into all of this we are born, the storytellers of the digital age. Finally, I think I start to understand. The technology I have spent my life wandering through, the digital wastelands that encompass most of my life exist because I can tell a story with it. All this work…and now I sit and look and realize the tools before me. I have them. I am ready.

Wow…I hope I don’t fuck this up….

I am taking a course this semester on The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. This past Sunday, the professor offered to show the class Pasolini’s 1972 film version of the tales I racconti di Canterbury. She stressed that attendance was entirely optional but said she would buy pizza for those who attended. All we had to do was sign up and then show up.

In total, eighteen people signed up. I was actually impressed. A lot of the people in this class seemed to be taking it to fill a requirement, but this showed me that more people than I expected were actually interested in expanding beyond the required subject matter. It turns out that I was wrong. Of the eighteen, only five of us showed up. This would have been fine if the professor hadn’t been kind enough to order the pizza. Since she believed 18 people were coming, she ordered several pizzas. In fact, she set everything up for eighteen people and what she was left with was nothing but pizza and disappointment.

I don’t get it. I really don’t. I work all day and sometimes part of the night. I do everything I can to stay caught up and to pursue my education and that is a full time challenge. I hate that I don’t have the time to take better advantage of the opportunities out there. Most of the students have no such excuse. They are there, ostensibly, solely to learn. Many have only a few classes and all the time in the world. I can’t imagine wasting that when so many different options are offered. These speakers, symposiums, lectures, studies and readings all help us to expand and grow beyond the confines of a classroom.

The bad news is that college is going to end for these kids and the world outside makes finding things like a viewing of a Pasolini film far more difficult. The sad news is that most will probably never care. In some ways I think I preferred being studying on my own. While I have found my return to college to be a positive experience in regard to my goals and my learning, my faith in the future of mankind is even more shaken. I always expected apathy but I am truly amazed at its depth.

“This is how the world works!” they told me holding forth the paper, white and black, in outstretched hands. “Read the words, learn the secrets, you too can have value.” It was hard not to retch. I imagined a life spent living in worship, in pursuit of a number, a number arbitrarily assigned by towers who only saw me as a unit in their vast operation. What value did I want with their enterprise? What care did I have for any of them. These vast creatures that devoured humanity were not to be trusted. Their victims, still chanting before me, confused and disturbed by my resistance, grew silent. These people, these worshipers at the idols of gold and silver never owned anything. They toiled for a tower that gave them a shelter, they toiled for a tower that gave them a transport, and they toiled for a tower that gave them food. They sold everything to own nothing and I pitied them.

My chains still rattle, though, reminding me that I once shared their fate. I can see them now wrapped around me. I am Marley reborn and I have systematically torn the chains away. Someday, I will be free. Even today, I am freer than most and the towers know it. They tease with invitations, they beg and wheedle, the seek to make me theirs with a constant influx of garish advertisement that disgust more than interest. I won’t go back.

This is not “how the world works,” it is how the world dies. A thousand souls offered up with cheer and joy to our gods of chrome, steel, silver, and gold. We stumble over ourselves, rushing to curry the favor of the tower, never realizing that the tower will never care. Look, another soul devoured, another dime for the pile, another debtors’ prison created. The dreams of millions shriveled down to a number, modern alchemy of the most evil kind.

“This is how the world works,” they tell me and I want to scream. I want to shake them free of the blind acceptance of such idiocy. They cannot hear me, though. The tower took their ears, eyes, mind, and soul long ago. There is nothing left to save.