the human network

I.

I have always loved to write. As far back as I possessed the capability to scribble a coherent narrative onto a piece of paper, I’ve written stories. I remember writing a short story in third or fourth grade, about astronauts on the first voyage to Mars. Many words about the launch, a few words about the journey, then a quick, mysterious conclusion once they landed. It all ended rather badly, I recall, with just a last call for help coming across the twenty-minute delayed airwaves, before all went silent.

In my senior year of high school, when I took “advanced placement” English, I had a teacher who was both English and the mother of one of my good friends. In a small class – only about ten of us – unmercifully drilling the rules and structure of the essay into us, she points off for every misspelled word. As I have always spelled atrociously, I had to make up for it by scoring very highly on composition skills. (Thankfully, computers do our spelling for us now, which shows you the banality of the task – better automated than done by a person.) I learned to avoid the passive voice, learned to litter my texts with commas – to better approximate the cadence of the “inner voice”, and wrote a thirty-page research paper on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, which, I now realize, I understood not at all.

At MIT, I had the good fortune to have Frank Conroy as my lecturer in a short story writing workshop. MIT, hardly known as a bastion of the humanities – except insofar as economics, the dismal science, falls under that umbrella – did have the money and the reputation to attract some of the very best writers and thinkers in the United States. William Irwin Thompson, whom I regard as one of the fundamental influences in my thinking, taught at MIT in the 1960s, if only so he could spend the next thirty years writing piercing critiques of managerial civilization. Frank Conroy, by the time I’d met him, had already received broad critical acclaim for his novel-memoire Stop-Time, which received a nomination for the National Book Award. A classic archetype of the humanities professor, with tweed jacket and pullover sweater and an unruly shock of graying hair and nicotine stains on his teeth, Conroy loved writing, and passed that love along to his students. At MIT, where most writing took place in LISP or FORTRAN, not English, that represented a Sisyphean task. Students enrolled in humanities courses not for any love of Proust or Picasso or Prokofiev, but because they had graduation requirements to fulfill. Resented as interruptions in the “real” work of mastering nature, the humanities continue thrive at MIT despite persistent institutional neglect. None of this seemed to bother Conroy; he took the shy freshmen who attended his lectures and drew them out, encouraging them to explore the world inside their heads on the written page.

That year, I won the Freshman Fiction Award at MIT – my only moment of academic distinction during my curtailed tenure there. Frank Conroy deserves the credit for that. He taught me to avoid the passive voice: “Look to Orwell. Read Nineteen Eighty-Four. You can go pages before you read a single sentence in the passive voice.” He taught me that the true stories, the best stories, come from experience. Write what you know, as clearly and capably as you can. Show, don’t tell; let the story expose itself.

I failed academically at MIT, missing many, many lectures – too depressed, some days, to get out of bed until after sunset. Nonetheless, at the end of term, writing prize in hand, I visited Conroy in his office, to thank him. He seemed genuinely surprised and touched. “I’m just sorry we didn’t have more time together,” he remarked, gently upbraiding me for my ever-more-frequent absences. “I’m leaving at the end of term.” Conroy had just received an appointment to head the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, a perch from which he would nurture an entire generation of American writers. That was the last time I ever saw him.

That last sentence, in the passive voice, marks the first you’ve read so far. Frank Conroy taught me well.

II.

Fourteen years later, following the invention of VRML, I received an offer from a technical publishing company, New Riders Publishing, to write the very first book on VRML. I’d never thought I’d have the opportunity to write a book on any subject; in the years since dropping out of MIT, I’d become a professional software engineer. With only a few small exceptions, all of my writing took place in assembly language or ‘C’. I poured my intellect into code, banging bits, breathing life into programs. But a book about a subject near and dear to me, a subject that I (arguably) knew better than any other person, that seemed tailor-made. I accepted, without really knowing what would happen next.

I procrastinated. And procrastinated. Something about facing not just a single sheet of blank paper, but two hundred of them, freaked me out. My publisher, growing worried, finally sent me an email which simply read:

Your house is burning down.

Meaning, I suppose, that unless I delivered a manuscript, more or less immediately, that’d be an end to it. No book, no deal, no nothing. I flew to my father’s house, just outside of Boston, sat down at my laptop, and cranked out the manuscript – all 350 pages – in just 31 days.

I know that’s considered extraordinarily fast, but I’ve always written quickly. Words either come or they do not, and I can gauge my own engagement with the subject by how quickly they come. (For example, I’ve written the last thousand-or-so words in an hour’s time. That’s just about my usual rate when I’m writing.) Writing can not be forced. If it takes days to write a single paragraph, I’ve learned to recognize that I’m simply not yet ready to write. Though never fickle, my muse won’t be hurried. But, when I’m ready to write, it becomes almost impossible to avoid. The words create a strange pressure within me, wanting to pound their way out of my head and onto the page. Over the years, that pressure has driven me to produce several thousand pages of written works: books, scholarly articles, opinions and commentaries, and many, many essays.

The essay is my preferred form. It feels appropriate and very natural. From the French for “to attempt” (essayer), an essay allows the author to mix the personal and subjective with the actual and authoritative. Joan Didion – perhaps the greatest American essayist of the 20th century (and, so far, the greatest of the 21st) – combined her own neurotic and apocalyptic visions of a culture in collapse with the observational techniques of a city desk reporter to produce Slouching Towards Bethlehem, perhaps the definitive assessment of the 60’s counterculture in San Francisco. William Irwin Thompson combined his own neurotic and apocalyptic visions of a culture in collapse with the observational techniques of a ethnographer to produce Getting Back to Things at MIT, arguably the definitive humanistic critique of late Industrial Era civilization. (As a student at MIT, I received a reprint of that essay no fewer than three times – on the first day of three different humanities classes.) Hunter S. Thompson, though normally thought of as a journalist, wrote as an essayist: personal, poignant, and angry. And neurotic and apocalyptic.

Neurosis, we’ve learned, consists of a state of anxious awareness. Neurotics, intensely aware of the world around them, fear it may suddenly strike against them. Apparently, this has survival value: in times of chaos, the neurotic is the seeing man in the kingdom of the blind, and lives long enough to pass his neurotic genes along to another neurotic generation. Neurotics are nearly always apocalyptic in their thinking; the interior landscape of imminent doom, amplified across the perceptions of the psyche, become the visions of St. John of Patmos, a current of literature that flows on down through the ages to the Quetzalcoatl prophesies of Daniel Pinchbeck.

I am a neurotic, and my penchant toward the apocalyptic, well documented on YouTube and through various other media freely downloadable on the Internet, leaves little to the imagination. That I have gone quiet about various apocalyptic scenarios (for instance, I have said nothing about “2012” since a talk given at Burning Man in 2006) does not mean that I no longer entertain them. I read my various blogs, each of which, in its own particular way, echoes my apocalyptic turn of mind. I can fantasy an oil crash, or an economic crash, a crash of civilizational over-complexity (as New Scientist did, just a few weeks ago), or dream of a sudden, machinic singularity. I can scare myself, grinning into the funhouse mirrors of my neurotic mind, and, in so doing, come back with some ideas, which, when clothed in the appropriate language, seem not so much scary as entertaining and enlightening. Neurosis as creative strength.

But it does not do to scare the horses. Although my fellow neurotics want to hear the rising winds of chaos battering at the flimsy walls of human culture, I do not want to be a prophet. Instead, reason prevails throughout my work. Although The Playful World closes on what could be read as an fairly apocalyptic note, a world where the tide of history reverses, and parents learn the new language of the world from their children (a vision which, I will note here, appears to be coming to pass), those last few pages present a vista broad enough to allow a multitude of different readings. I do not intend to scare, and if you feel your heart beating faster as you close the pages of that book, that tells you more about you than about me. I simply painted as honest picture as I knew how.

My next book – the current book – will definitively end on an apocalyptic note. I wrestled with this, for many months, until I accepted that if I tell the story in any other way, it will not feel true. The transformations in human behavior, cultural organization, and our sudden rise into hyperempowerment mean that things will be growing increasingly chaotic for some years to come. This does not necessarily mean we will be doomed to an endless “War of all against all,” as prophesied by Hobbes. Forces will rise to oppose the forces of chaos; this may well result in even more chaos, but I consider it equally likely that the dynamic opposition of well-matched hyperempowered polities will result in a new form of social stability – one which looks nothing like anything we’re familiar with today. Either way, that is apocalypse, because, whichever outcome, everything utterly changes.

I have been working toward the expression of this idea for quite some time. Looking back on Becoming Transhuman, a feature-length film/performance piece I created for MINDSTATES 2001, I can see some the themes of The Human Network in their embryonic form. This idea has been with me a while, but only now have I learned the language necessary to express it in terms comprehensible to a broad audience of people who do not share my own neurotic tendencies. The film is not the book, but points directly toward the book. The times have caught up with my own apocalyptic visions. And I have found the words which will allow me to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre – without starting a riot.

III.

The Human Network opens with a basic assertion: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. I can demonstrate the truth of this statement, and will do so repeatedly throughout the first several chapters. I know full well that Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross and countless other writers have put the full texts of their work online, and that this has not cannibalized their sales, but increased them. I bought Stross’ Accelerando after I downloaded the entire text, read the first chapter on my computer, and realized I needed to have a printed copy of my own. I know this works. But can I convince any potential publisher to release The Human Network freely online at publication?

Publishing, hardly the most cutting-edge of industries, has mostly been immune to the rise of social media. Yes, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows showed up on file-sharing sites a few days before its international release, but that didn’t impact sales at all, despite the wails of complaint from Bloomsbury Publishing. A freely available electronic copy does not seem to interfere with physical sales of printed books. Whether most publishers know this, or care to know it, remains an open question. But how can I sign any publishing deal which constrains my work in ways which, given the points I make in the text, I consider both out-of-step with the times and actually detrimental to the long-term value of the work?

Yesterday, I posted the “Overview” section of the book proposal to this blog. That, in itself, was a remarkably bold act. Book proposals are regarded as “business confidential” material by all parties to a book deal – the author, the literary agent, and the publisher. The ideas contained within the proposal – which reflect the ideas explored in the book – are meant to be kept close to the chest, until the publisher’s marketing machinery cranks up the noise before an impending release. In this sense, book marketing is a carefully scripted, but utterly false drama: “Look at this new exciting thing!” A proposal revealed undercuts this sense of drama, even as it potentially builds up an audience interested in the book. I may have shot myself in the foot by posting this portion of the proposal. I may have made it difficult, if not impossible, to get a book deal. I knew this full well, and posted it anyway.

Now things get thornier. The next sections of the proposal – which I am meant to be writing today – are synopses of the various chapters of the book. They’ll all be short, perhaps a page in length, but will explore the ideas and the narrative structure of each chapter, noting how each builds on the chapter before, giving an interested publisher a good sense of how I’ll build the argument and carry it through to a successful conclusion. This is necessary for a publisher to read, but do I want to reveal it to my audience?

While I do firmly believe in transparency, I instinctively recoil from publicly providing a Cliffs Notes version of my text, which someone could scan through and feel as though they’d absorbed the key ideas in my work. This would not be true, because books always take weird and interesting directions in the writing, directions that even the author remains unaware of until the words appear on the page. But some might think, “Oh yeah, I read his chapter synopses, I know what he’s on about.” Perhaps I shouldn’t care; perhaps these people wouldn’t read my book in any case, freely available or purchased at the bookstore. Perhaps I should simply be glad that some of the space in their heads has been colonized by my ideas. And given that I do believe – and will demonstrate in the book – that sharing expertise results in an aggregate rise in the level of human intelligence, I should be satisfied with this. It is enough.

So here, at the end of this very odd essay – quite unlike any of the others posted on The Human Network blog – you have seen me argue myself into a reasoned position for complete, radical transparency. Transparency incurs costs: people can (and will) steal your ideas, your customers, the food from your mouth. But, in order to seal my ideas, you must first comprehend them, and in understanding my ideas you’ll realize that this kind of theft is impossible. Stealing my ideas only makes them more valuable, and makes me, as the originator of these ideas, more influential. Instead, absorb my work, improve upon it, then share those new ideas. In this way, you too will become influential, and I will find myself borrowing from your work.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 5:03 pm and is filed under blog, hyperdistribution, hyperempowerment, hyperpeople, meta, publishing, sharing, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.