Digital Infants

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself; (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” – Walt Whitman

“Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.” – George Orwell

“Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.” – George Saunders

I’m not sure. I like a french press in the morning and finding a good album on Spotify. Right now I am listening to Kurt Vile. I study engineering and admire Richard Feynman. I have a blog and explore politics and art. I have a new Youtube channel where I do that also.

I’m not sure. We like Persian rugs and odd coffee mugs. I like reading Vonnegut, Didion, and Bucky Fuller. We started a Design company and have been paid for it. I like writing poems late into night when studying Thermodynamics. I like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and probably moved to New York City for them, even though Allen died the year after I was born and Jack way before that. I ended up moving to Brooklyn when I realized that Washington Square Park was no longer the common circle for cool cadres, but instead just a bunch of unsure NYU undergraduates (like me). I feel lucky and poorly timed in the face of AI and an imminent market crash. But I also feel uncharacteristically relaxed for this generation.

I’m not sure what I want to be so instead I answer with what I want to do. Uber and AirBnB and David Dobrik make millennials want to be rich. Tim Ferris asks how we can work smarter and find balance. Sugar is bad for me so I order a 24-pack of Zevia every month off of Amazon. People my age still smoke cigarettes because cool people did too.

I’m not sure what I want to be so I answer with what I’d like to do. The ever-present eagerness to go viral has created an adolescent presence predicated on anxiousness and a desire for attention always. A desire to have a “thing”, to be something that is digestible and easy to brand. I fight this impatience every week or so when it crops up again after watching train cars of successive online content roll by. I go from Youtube to the Podcast App to Twitter to Instagram. You’re All Caught Up! And the worst part is the intelligent and valuable information I get from this is entirely mixed in with the boring characters of Woke Culture or Influencer Money.

Joe Rogan-Gary Vaynerchuk-Tim Ferriss-Tim Urban-Sam Harris-Marc Maron-h3h3-Your Mom’s House-Very Bad Wizards-Josh Zepps. The loop of sincere help, humor, and inspiration. My favorite algorithm chain, like a futurist’s answer to the famous dinner party question, where I can sit next to everyone at once.

And then there is the competing pleasure of old content. Essays and books and poems by Annie Dillard, Susan Sontag, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Bertrand Russell, Frank O’Hara…

And then there is the additional competing pleasure in music. John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Neil Young… And those damn Tiny Desk Sessions. My headphones are on always, oscillating between the two choices we all have to make: podcast or music? Of course we never choose, we don’t really have to. But there is still opportunity cost in our consumption. But the awareness of that cost wasn’t there before because before the internet was a kind of blissful ignorance to the library of babble we were missing out on.

Is the conflict old media versus new media? Is this why the new media I tend to graze is almost always long form? Long conversations, with an intelligent exchange of information and pleasure and an equal amount of coffee or Yerba Mate tea. I see the Persian rugs and imagine it is raining outside. The image of the legendary Maron Garage and leaping cats is in mind (Mila Kunis and Paul McCartney, same month). But this dichotomy seems silly and too easy to make, plus Kunis and McCartney were both great episodes. Perhaps the real truth is that curiosity and an honest good faith exploration of human endeavors will always win, clickbait notwithstanding. It must be the same phenomena that makes our era of media so damn saccharine and dishonest like the sugar Coca-Cola has been feeding to us forever, like a bad mother who gets paid to lactate. But I do miss the classic cool of Coke while I sip my poorly branded Zevias.

It must be that same tension of honest humanity versus the impatient greed for fifteen minutes of fame. The familiar obsession of celebrity and the desperation that comes with it. A dull headache comes on after I have switched from Twitter to Facebook to Instagram and then back to Twitter. Responsible now for the self-aware clickbait and ad-driven hyperlinks masquerading as brick and mortar factories of knowledge. Responsible for newly branded “Fake News” and the awful concept distortion of the very real tool called propaganda and lies. Culpable for the cunning resurrection of ad hominem and creepy reactionary “hot take” burning holes through our collective iris and cornia.

Our generation, anyone old or young enough to be reading this, has a fascination with material in a cowardly new world of immaterial. The digital infants, We, are utterly alone and afraid. The newborns have no sense of place or belonging. They find friends through videos. This is fine on its surface, lonely people have often used art to comfort their loneliness. But now, it doesn’t feel as focused. The newborns click and click and post photos and share SoundCloud links and have internet beefs. A lot of them are enjoying the spoils of being the first generation of kids and teenagers who have not lived without the internet. And also of having the first generation of parents to have to raise those same kids and teenagers. The growing pains of the new age are sharp and unrelenting. We will get better at this.

The toddlers among us, twenty-somethings and older, are equally confused and afraid. We channel loneliness and fear into Twitter wars or Facebook diatribes against a distant relative. We read and forward clickbait. We post hot takes and condescending replies to strangers. We retweet signs of weakness or mistakes with holy commentary broadcasting our virtue. We have reopened the dumb dichotomy of Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell. People are singular moral entities, and one transgression or possible transgression is enough to put you away for life without parole. The overwhelming feeling is anxiousness. Politically and personally. The softer anxiety is that we aren’t famous enough or rich enough even though peers among us have won the lottery and landed best-ranked podcasts, modest brand deals or coveted columns at online magazines. The more vicious anxiety is the born-again confidence of racists, the stripling silliness of Anti-Fa and so-called Social Justice Warriors, the unburying of socialism, the shortcomings of capitalism, the absence of nuance, the banning and blocking and boring bad faith behavior all around us. I hope it doesn’t seem like I am projecting, because I have seen this collective cultural dark night of the soul and I think I have successfully escaped it.

I think that our culture is in a soft crisis. Don’t worry, history hints that all will be alright. But now it still feels like a fever, even if the rise in temperature and fall in temperament are not fatal.  What brilliant break-out podcast will make climate change sexy? Will the ad for MeUndies take away from the seriousness? When will nuclear disarmament mean disarming the nukes?

Existential risks aside (cause what else can I do with those pesky guys?), the cure to our crisis seems to be honesty. Not the kind of honesty that fetishizes Truth, but genuine human honesty. Accepting the messiness of straining the spaghetti of complex human experience. Abandoning the genetic relic of tribalist impulses and talking to one another. Refusing to slap clickbait-y headlines to our articles or Youtube videos, in spite of poorer viewership.  Maybe your MAGA neighbor is indeed racist, but at least talk to him decently until you find out for sure. And even when you’re sure, talk to him and change his mind for crying out loud. Maybe Roseanne isn’t racist because of one Ambien inspired tweet. Maybe all young liberals aren’t crazy or members of Anti-Fa and you needn’t walk away from the Left. Maybe Hillary isn’t evil just because she was a self-interested politician. What we need above all, is patience. That wealth can wait while searching for what you want to do. And the removal of the burden of self-branding trying to answer what you want to be. 

The same advice that keeps me from losing my cool when looking through my Notes app at all of the conflicting career and life goals, that Whitman advice of containing multitudes, should be embraced culturally. People and life are contradictions and that is just fine. It has to be. This might be what has been most readily forgotten in our recent fever of the internet and new media. The old content was tangible art that was usually read, and readers were patient with every word. And the old content showed us complexity and reminded us of our contradictions. Increasingly we need to prop up the new art that does this too. Individually we need to slow down and relax. It isn’t fun being the optimistic one calling for everyone to love one another. It is far easier and cooler to be the cynic. But to break our fever I think we need to make the decision to cast cynicism aside and choose patience and good will.

I write because it is enjoyable and clearing, not because I am looking for a book deal. I make Youtube videos because it is fun and new, not because I have seen how over-crammed Casey Neistat’s PO Box can become with free gifts. Podcasts, books, blog posts, videos, posts of any kind really need to start being ends in themselves. Don’t start one or write one or share one because it will forward your chances of success only. Do it because there is a bit of honesty there, not to expose or belittle but to relieve or refresh. I’m not sure what I want to be so I choose to answer instead with what I’d like to do and this type of honesty is part of it. The things we do are swirling contradictions. No single action or tweet should freeze our identity in an ice block of absolutism.