Free and Unlimited Data

 On a gallows a couple serious-faced authorities offer a man his final chance to tell King George, and God, whose original thought, duly executed by the soon-to-be-executee, began the series of actions that led to a rope around his neck. The ruins of a smoking cotton mill lie behind them, and a repeating pair of footsteps in the mud lead from a workshop to the very spot the fire was set, then to the pub. Two more sets of footprints, themselves originating from the constabulary, intercept the first pair inside the pub, then lead them to the hangman’s workstation. The reader may imagine a quick detour to the county judge’s office, if so inclined.

 

In a delightful cockney accent, a Monty Python-esq, dirty-faced peasant shouts,

 “Tell ‘im Ned Ludd put ye up to it!”

 

“Yeah,” says the accused, “‘twas Ned Ludd, King of Arson, told me burn the cotton gin! Hehe, right lads?”

 

(Crowd laughs)

 

“Ned Ludd eh? Well, let this be a lesson to him. Hangman! Loose the noose!”

 

And from that possibly apocryphal story the folk hero Ned Ludd becomes civil disobedience’s mascot during the industrial revolution. The so called “Luddites” lay clandestine waste to the new technologies of the their age – turbines, crankshafts, hydraulics – in a desperate guerrilla war to maintain a way of life predicated on those acts of textile craftsmanship and small-scale economic stability deemed antithetical to industrial growth.

 

 

Though the Luddite’s bravery can’t be discounted, and should probably be lauded, as I sit typing on a mass-produced word processing device in a coffee shop harboring rows of well-fed people employed identically, I concede Ludditism’s failure equates long-term social progress – err, not counting sweatshop workers or anybody other than the upper classes for most of the last hundred years… It’s a net-gain, that is, for human kind…

 

Let me start over: the industrial revolution de-burred some diseases and replaced starvation with obesity, I mean, and the digital revolution (if it’s OK to use that term without historical distance) could possibly go a step further and take care of that mortality thing altogether by letting people download the ‘ol noggin onto a hard drive. Think of that, all our thoughts and memories coagulated in an easily accessible network.

 

Wow, the future.

 

But with contemporary humanity seemingly pleased with the progress of its advancements, one wonders how our descendants will distinguish carbon-based life from its silicon-based doppelganger? While we’re currently worrying about the environment or whatever the bozos who run the country are up to, the defining question of the future could very well be, “Who’s in charge here?”

 

 

I’m going to share a tale about a single spot in Chicago – The Infamous Oak Street Curve – and I’d like you to be present on the page with me. It’s “Infamous” because while this story is both true and mine, I’ve heard the setting and major plot-points repeated by a half-dozen strangers, all assuming it’s their original, individual experience – so adding you in won’t hurt the authenticity too much. And anyway if you don’t like my version you can search the Internet for somebody else’s.

 

It begins a few Februaries ago with wind pushing water up and over bulwarks, where it freezes in dinner-plate-smooth layers on the bike path, thickening by the hour. The curve is of the convex variety; it makes a concrete peninsula, and the waves have a direct vector to hit it with full force, pushing all the way across the path and to the wall. We exchange glances, you and I, quietly urging some action: either cross the ice or give up and hike the half-mile back to the trail’s exit. In this part of downtown Chicago the bike path resembles a tollway: hemmed on one side by Lake Michigan, and on the other by a twelve-foot tall concrete wall, with few strategically inconvenient off ramps. You see me as a young bearded fool in all my cold-weather gear standing beside my bicycle, considering the enormous glass pane of ice as it covers the curve from wall to water, and follows the gentle slope to the bulwarks and the rhythmic waves cresting and leaving a part of themselves frozen in ebb.

 

You stay put while I move ahead and make it eight or nine paces, roughly to the middle of the sheet, before both tires and legs slip out so quickly I hold stationary in the air like Wile E. Coyote to contemplate the eventual descent, which I accept with enough gusto to leave a spider web crack where my elbow struck. Then, at a pace so slow I can count the individual quartz grains in the concrete beneath me, the wet void pulls me closer.

 

You remain at the edge, watching. I have nothing to grab; the ice levels out every bump and imperfection between itself and the lake. My rubber boots, my leather gloves: useless on this frictionless slope. The rules of a built environment, premised on the supremacy of smooth surfaces, safety, and efficiency, are tools to advance a cartoonishly malevolent plot in this bizarro dreamscape-made-wakescape. The author as Wile E. Coyote morphs into James Bond, strapped to a conveyer belt before the jaws of some villain’s murder device. A million people fill the same square mile as us, but on other side of the wall, an alternate reality, drowned out by the rushing cars on Lakeshore Drive.

 

The one thing leaving a mark in the ice, a thin white line pointing from where my body fell to where I’m headed, is my bike’s metal pedal, an arm’s length away. You neither offer help nor impede me as I reach, grab, and in a sort of reverse pelvic thrust move the bike under my stomach so my weight focuses over the center of gravity. The pedal-cum-icepick digs deep and stops my progress. Resting on my knees and channeling the image of Everest mountaineers I’ve seen on TV, I lift the bike and drop it, pedal first, a foot in front, then drag my body up to it. Every time I get on my knees to push the bike forward a foot, I slide back six inches. Then the first of a set of waves roll in, splashing between my pants and boot. You take a step back to keep dry.

Leave the story for a moment – though stay on the page, please – I want to keep this narrative accurate but I don’t know how long it took me to inchworm to safety, the part of my brain responsible for panic re-appropriated the resources normally slated for memories, and I’d rather not leave you out in the cold unnecessarily. But I do recall one instance, just before getting to dry concrete, when a wave swelled up, grabbed me, and pulled my body back. Exhausted, soaked, and so numb I had trouble holding on to the bike, elbow stiff and swelling from the earlier fall, I’m certain that if one more thing went wrong I would have drowned.

 

Though, evidently, I lived to share this with you. You: a passenger, and me: the vehicle. Through the word processor and automated dissemination you and I, and Wile E. Coyote, and James Bond transcend our current place in space/time to succeed against an unrelenting adversary: the damp infinity of Lake Michigan. And we can do it again, whenever you want. Go a step further and copy/paste the text to a screen, then replace my name with yours. Now whose story is it?

 

Make smart decisions. 45deg water. Probably 6-8 ft of water with no guardrail. From ABC 7 Chicago from r/chibike

That evening I shared a version of this tale with my mom over text messaging.  Because I’m a good son, and want to keep her informed but worry-free, I redacted the parts involving the wristwatch-checking specter of death. Her reply came in the concise, idiomatic structure encouraged by that medium, “well i hope you learned you lesson.”

 

Indeed. Seeking to profit off that lesson, I solicited a corporate design firm with a more hyperbolic rendering, saying they could use it on their blog to sell their gadget: a little video camera that attaches to a bike and records on a loop. It’s supposed to provide safety, says their marketing, but if a cyclist dies on the road, and the camera does as intended by telling the story of how, then it becomes a tool for vengeance – or justice? – thereby creating more reasons for violence, the exact opposite of a safety measure. Technology sans philosophy, encouraged through money, and me – haha!

 

The corporation gobbled my bait and sent me a camera with the very non-nonfiction directive to capture some images that approximate how the more dramatic parts of my story might have looked, had I been using their product at the time:

Our business relationship didn’t last. They commissioned two more articles, which I put off school assignments to write, entertaining the naïve artist’s expectation of big-time ascension, sponsored by corporate daddy-ism. They published, but didn’t pay. “But think of the exposure!”

 

I bring this up because I’m not working (for pay) at the moment so that I can write more, I tell people. A more accurate explanation would be that there just isn’t much for me to do out in the economy right now and instead of getting in the way it’s better I sit out a few quarters. Yet an unemployed mind can’t help but lapse into economic reveries during winter’s hardest efforts – for lack of stimulation, a byproduct of the luxury provided by cellulose insulation and radiator heating. No walking barefoot uphill through snow to chop up firewood for me, comfort surrounds the modern man, and so I fetishize its absence, ignoring discomfort’s immanency as my savings dissipate.

 

Or, perhaps the soft Marino sweaters, hot coffee, and endless passive but free entertainment provided by my computer’s 2.4 GHz connection to the Great Online aren’t truly pleasure, but a simulacrum. “…a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom,” said Thomas Paine, on a February day much like this one in 1776, as if speaking to the tyranny of feudal governance compares to the plight of the over-indulged artist in the age of digital reproduction.

 

And so wanting becomes longing, and comfort reverses upon itself, and I need a diversion. I think a good sensation will come from feeling my receding hairline perk up against a brisk wind, reminding me it’s still fighting eventuality in a brave but futile metaphor for the human condition.

 

Roused, my thoughts circle the Oak Street Curve. I wonder what’s going on there today.

 

During the summer the parks department put up a curb to act as secondary bulwark, disrupting the otherwise smooth, angled transition between wall and water. Its exists as a response to the stories like the one above, which thanks to Internet forums are well-known in the Chicago cycling community. But as far as safety measures go, it fumbles ten yards short of adequacy, so I find myself thrust into adventure again: watching from the dry pavement as a coatless jogger slips and re-grips in staccato half-falls, the distance between death and destination growing, inversely, as the James Bond villain conveyer belt tries another victim. I don’t want to save him and don’t know if I’m able. He cannot walk on ice, seems intellectually unable to grasp the concept: after every slip he gets back into a feet-together-ready-to-launch-off stance, then tries to walk – walk! not shuffle or crawl, but walk! – up the slope to safety. Gloveless, hatless, sweat-panted and sweat-shirted, defying winter and recording his slapstick with a cell phone; he is impracticality’s inspiration, the bouncing twenty-something-year-old baby of incompetence inbred with incompetence. And, he’s smiling! He pans the phone to me. Now I’m implicated, a hesitant first-responder forced to intervene on natural selection’s wondrous design – man vs nature interrupted, damn it all.

 

I walk out halfway, my bike beside me, held by the handlebars as usual. But nature, having premised this story, concludes it just as well: a large set of rollers crest the bulwarks, breaking and sending gentle wavy emissaries up the slant. Uncommon meteorological events from the previous week conspired to make the waves warm enough to melt the ice it covers for a moment before transferring that energy to the air to make a fog, so only us two concrete beach boys witness the behind-the-scenes details of his film. The brief melt gives the man time and de-iced cement to walk (walk!) up the slope to where he reaches a boulder-sized salt chunk, left by the parks department. Pushing off, he slides to safety – then, irritatingly, walks a few paces down the trail, towards the water’s edge, to repeat his luck, still recording.

 

Meanwhile, my bike and I stand in the middle of the curve. The devil’s ice-rink re-forms around me. So much for heroism. A lapse in the rollers provides my escape: I push off the wall to the salt boulder, then push off that to the other side of the ice pane.

 

He and I shared an event, and he shared it with whomever watched his phone’s feed, and I’m sharing it with you. Ours was a unique experience, artisanal even, turned commodity through automating technologies. Is this the future? A life spent treasure-hunting singularities to disseminate in between brief and unsubstantial bouts of paid labor? A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, indicating nothing?

 

Not a bad gig, if you can get it.

 

Of all the amazing gifts our ever-advancing industrialization grants, the ability to distribute the best moments of a lifetime through communicating mediums at an immediate speed and infinite scale marks the apex.

 

Or maybe the nadir, since consequences only apply to the temporal actors, and the audience has no incentive to interpret prudently.

 

Or maybe the apex again, but only if I can make a living at it.

 

 

But to finish the story of the Luddites, they all died. C’est la vie. Upshot: a lot of them had children, some of whom went on to lives that inspired great works of art: Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Jean-Francois Millet’s The Gleaners, this image:

 

 

But the paradigm shifts in civilization brought on by the industrial revolution weren’t all boons. Can we just take a moment to consider the little fingers of children? Alas, they really are the best tool for fine-detail work – now wasted on who knows what, probably video games. Thank the welfare state for that.

 

Just kidding. When I go on about the luddites it’s to make fun of myself in a roundabout way, because a noble but futile protest makes good story-fodder until you try to derive a lesson. The Luddites weren’t wrong to fight for their beliefs, to sabotage the tools that would hasten their entry to the growing class of working poor. But I’m also glad I don’t have to tell these stories through a loomed tapestry. Perhaps obsolescence is something to wait for like a birthday present; when the robots come to take my job, if I ever get another job, imagine how much more time I’ll have to blog about my bike rides. You won’t see me burning down any cotton gins, no siree – give me one of those universal basic incomes and I’ll be head of the parade. All hail our computer overlords!

 

“Authoritarian technics,” that’s what Professor Techno-Nerd, Lewis Mumford, calls it when the chips and processors take over. Rather than a computer system working to benefit mankind, mankind labors to keep advancing the digital cause – simply for the sake of lessening the role of humanity in society. While the content online becomes more democratic, since anybody with a smartphone can play TV producer, the occasion grows more authoritarian because there’s only one Internet, and most of the effort put into it never leaves the limit-less confines of that computerized netherworld. And the more we give to the automata, the less we have to maintain ourselves. Because wouldn’t it be better if someone else took care of the messy parts of civilization? Let the Taxbot 5000 file my 1099-MISC, I’ll be here watching these web celebrities dump ice buckets on their heads. 

 

Or see me in the summer, again at the Oak Street Curve. The waves are calm and warm, I might just ride into them for the fun of it, but I won’t; first rule of bike ownership: don’t drop it in a lake, dummy. As I cruise at a robust gallop, I hear an inline skater behind me, trying to use the slipstream created by my body rushing through air to save himself the effort of doing the same. I hate when skaters draft off bikes like this; if I suddenly brake they’ll crash right into my back, and then I’ll be stuck listening to them cry while trying to yank a (hopefully) mangled limb out of my spokes. We’re rival technologies, sharing a goal but headed there differently and with all the animosity of two monkey tribes barking across a river. I’m considering how best to tell the skater off when chance, the Great Disruptor, intervenes. I strike a loose stone. It goes ‘ping!’ off my front tire and then skip, skip, skip against the cement. While it does little to my movement, the nature of the skater’s locomotion is such that a small stone, struck at the wrong moment, right when he’s leaning full-weight to one side, can jam his polyurathane wheel as if a lake-monster grabbed his leg. What follows is his immediate transition from vertical to prone. Blame the ghost of Ned Ludd for what happens to the skater’s Lycra shorts and jersey; built by textile machines of inhuman complexity and designed to slice air like a knife, they instead grate like cheese against the cement. Even at that speed some parts of his body stick, defying inertia, while other parts do not, inelastically. 

 

I remember; you were there. You had your phone out, quick-draw-like. You called an ambulance, right? Maybe you looked up first-aid. Or, maybe you shot a video, recorded his pain to re-play on your channel, a million hits a day with a fifteen-second ad before and after. I won’t judge you for that; the cell company makes money regardless, so why shouldn’t you? The skater persists through time, his immortal being captured by the camera, forever in agony that anyone can share. The experience duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates and the consequence, actual human pain, remains singular. Nonetheless, under imagination’s lens everyone watching learns a lesson, a private souvenir. The digital is to waking life what the production line is to the craftsman; a bigger and more efficient way to persist at an ugly enterprise – whose end result we think we need because “knowledge,” the saying assures us, “is power.” And “power,” I want to add, becomes more worthy of hoarding the thinner it’s spread.

 

What of me? I kept riding on. If you asked I’d have told you to do the same. The material world is one of violence and pain. It’s a necessity, forced upon us because humanity has no alternative – yet.

 

Let the guy’s misery stay isolated. There’re only so many good days before next winter, and they say you should set limits on screen time. 😎

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