The Devil's New Bargain

The community of eight billion, the new addictive substances, the thousand generations of available television, and a note on phony infinities.

I’ve been working without much joy lately. There are reasons I know, and reasons I suspect will become clear later.

One thing that I’ve been working on involves writing things by hand, cutting cardboard, brushing on glue and then waiting for the glue to dry. Over the weekend, I was doing this. But I had company. My four-year-old little boy was also at the desk, drawing. We had some banjo music playing.

While he drew, I applied glue with a brush, holding the pieces together firmly, making mistakes and trying to fix them. He would ask the occasional question, or take another sheet of paper. It was the best I’d felt while working - the least embattled or desperate - in a while.

A moment of happiness has a way of revealing the misconceptions I too often labor under. The thing about that moment was that there was nothing scalable about it.

Scale and scalability

The human world - in the sense of a global society - is as big as it’s ever been. There are more people. We’re all capable of interacting with more of each other, and less able to avoid more people than ever before.

These are facts and they’re feelings. This is an oppressive reality and an intoxicating possibility. The intoxication worries more than the oppressiveness these days.

The context of…

In 1980, George W.S. Trow wrote about “the grid of two hundred million,” in his masterful Within the Context of No Context. The grid of two hundred million referred to the people in the United States whose lives were reflected back to them by television. This grid was an overbearing presence.

In the essay, Trow does a lot of things. Among them, he assails the effects of television and mass media as a force that diminishes the ability of people to be either adequately alone or intimate with one another. I grew up in a house with two televisions and I felt this grand-scale theft and distortion keenly. I can only imagine what my kids think of their parents, with phones always charged and at the ready.

Counterpoint

My father was the last kid on his block to have a television. The first thing he saw on that TV was the Rose Parade, three thousand miles from his three-decker in Worcester, Massachusetts. Decades later, he still talks about how incredible it was, even in black and white, noting that he’d never bother to watch a parade so many decades of TV later.

My father and George W.S. Trow were born less than twelve months apart, during World War II. Though antipodes in terms of background and temperament, they both had a sense of what the world was like before TV, and what it became after. It’s not an experience I expected to have as a kid, but then came the internet.

For Trow, the TV was a fountain of delusion and false joy, of isolation and anomie. My father loved TV as a kid. When he came home from Vietnam, all my dad wanted to do for a while was watch TV. He loves TV to this day.

By the highway side

After the Second World War, America changed. It got interstate highways and it got television. After the Cold War, America got the Internet, where we now watch TV, and which is often referred to as a kind of highway.

The devil’s new name

Every age has a fresh-faced goblin squatting on its brain. The newcomer in ours goes by the name of scalability. The concept started in business, where it’s the ability of a company to grow without changing what it does. For an idea, scalability is the ability to be embraced, adopted and acted out without changing what it is.