“I’ve seen the future and it will be.”

The title of this entry is taken from Prince’s song “The Future”*, and for a long time I didn’t understand what it meant. But I’m coming to realize that its ambiguity is intentional. We never know what’s coming, but the future *will* be, however it turns out. It came to mind because of some work I was doing for my parents last week. My wife is in the ongoing process of helping them go through their house and organize, and this particular session involved a lot of paper shredding, which I volunteered for. I think of myself as an expert shredder, having worked in the Borders accounting department for almost a year in the 90s. What I ended up for my parents was disposing bags of papers with any personal information – from late-1980s check stubs to the torn-off subscription information of hundreds of magazine covers.

The experience – and the subsequent dinner conversation later that day -- brought into focus a kind of generational difference on the wired world we live in today. My parents – and by that I mostly mean my mother, since my dad is so reluctant to new technology that he’s never used the Internet – is inherently suspicious of anything and everything having to do with the web. It’s been hard to even get her to pay her bills online. She doesn’t seem to grasp that the people who have online businesses are hyper-aware that their livelihoods depend on making sure that your transactions are safe and secure.

My wife and I are much more realistic about security and privacy, but I can understand my mom’s mild paranoia. Patton Oswalt has a great chapter in his book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland that attempts to explain how he, and most of Generation X (of which I’m a member), are suspicious of the new wired world. Things that used to be free, like TV, now cost money to use, and things that used to cost money, like music, are now free. Growing up before the revolution, living through it, and having kids who never know what it is to be unplugged has given us a unique perspective, an appreciation for the inevitability, the possibility and the wonder, of everything the new world has to offer.

Not having used the Internet until her fifties, my mom doesn’t have the same trust that comes through familiarity and understanding. Shredding every document that has any personal information on it is a good prevention against identity theft, if (and this is a big IF) you believe the only thing keeping people from stealing from you is because it’s hard. Even so, I don’t think that any cyber-criminal worth his salt is going to be rummaging through anyone’s trash. There are much easier ways, and again we come to that flip-flop of common sense that Patton talked about.

In talking about this with my mom and wife, we started having a discussion about bullying, both online and in person. The consensus we all came to was that bullying seems to be getting better, mostly because of the spotlight that social media has thrown on it recently. On the other hand, it also seems like there are new opportunities for cyberbullying, so maybe the new venue is simply balancing out the equation. I don’t think that bullying will ever end… there will always be parents who are abusive or neglectful to their children, and in turn those children will always turn around and punish those around them. But the level of transparency is rising, from cameras on school buses to the saving of text messages.

And that, ultimately, that’s the crux of the issue. The Internet is a tool, and as such it can be used to build something new, or knock something down. I’ve always had a pragmatic view of society and everything new that gets introduced into it… there will be problems and solutions, some things will be harder and some will be easier, but eventually things will settle out, and more often than not we’ll turn out better for it. Society will progress.

An example of this that I’m trying to hold onto is the recent collusion of Amazon and the Department of Justice in bringing monopoly charges against all the major book publishers. They allege that they met with Apple in an attempt to fix book prices, which ironically would prevent Amazon from basically giving away e-books to promote their Kindle Fire tablet computer. Personally, I believe that this will de-value books in general, and as a result publishing companies will have to downsize or fold altogether, and book quality will go down, with unedited, unsolicited tripe being just as available as thoughtful high-profile titles. Now, if I wasn’t biased against the survival of the publisher system – bear in mind that up until this year, my whole life has hinged on the idea of books as quality entertainment and information – I’d have to go back to the last paragraph and say that eventually this will be a benefit for writing as an art. But right now I just can’t see it that way.

I firmly believe that with the way things are going, running a book publishing company is going to become an untenable prospect, and if they don’t disappear completely, they will have to downsize to the size of a small marketing firm to survive. If there were only time to adjust, there wouldn’t be thousands of jobs lost, and lives impacted. But my wife brought up a good point about this: the newspaper and music industries weren’t given time to adjust and adapt, why should books be any different? And maybe this will open the door for all those part-time writers – myself included – whose main reason for not being published is the sheer number of rejection letters to expect and hoops to jump through. Maybe we’ll be opening up a whole new world of voices and ideas. Or maybe people will start universally using apostrophes to pluralize things.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. I have to go back to Prince, and present my quote of “The Future” in full: “I’ve seen the future and it will be / I’ve seen the future and it works.” Here’s hoping that it does.

*Geeky Music Fact™: This song is probably best known by its being sampled in one of Prince’s biggest hits, “Batdance” from the 1989 Batman movie soundtrack. “Batdance” itself is a sample-filled remix of a song called “200 Balloons” that was also written for the movie, but failed to appear on the album at all.

Eloquence in its Purest Sense

For a few years at the beginning of the century, I went back to school for a few semesters. I decided that I wanted to take more math and physics courses, partly to see if I could do them, and partly because I didn’t feel that I gave them a fair shake the first time around.

There was one particular calculus class that I remember clearly; we had finished all the preliminary work at the beginning of the semester, and were finally getting to the basic premise of the whole thing. Calculus, we were learning by degrees, is all about determining the area when the shape you’re measuring is curved. It’s actually a pretty abstract concept… you have to divide up the area you want to measure into smaller and smaller bits, until you’re essentially divining what would happen if you were to split it up into infinitely small parts and measure them all individually. Surprisingly, there’s a very accurate set of rules for doing this.

Anyway, the teacher was spending a whole class period leading us through the steps to this final realization, and I realized about ten minutes before he was done that I knew where it all was going. There was no series of logical jumps went through my mind. The Big Idea was suddenly just *there*, and I had an intensely visceral reaction to it. My face got hot, my heart sped up, and I was almost jumping out of my seat for the teacher to get to the end of his spiel already, and tell me that which I already knew was right.

I’ve learned since that this kind of reaction isn’t uncommon. It’s said that Einstein had heart palpitations for days after making the leap of intuition that lead to his understanding relativity. Not that I’m comparing him and me by any stretch, but it happens. I can only imagine what must have been going on in his head at that moment… with so many thoughts arrayed in his mind, then having them all jump together suddenly into a beautifully elegant solution, seemingly of their own volition.

Later on, I read Dianetics -- the textbook for Scientology – just to see what the big deal was, and one of the (few) worthwhile things that I took away from it was the point that, at its highest level of function, the human mind doesn’t work in language. The majority of thoughts that go through our heads are, however… we actually think the words in our heads, even though we don’t say them. But those great flashes of insight occur instantaneously, with no coherent form or structure. They just *happen*.

Studies of the brain have shown that your mind does two things when you say a word… a certain area of the brain forms the word by flashing a particular pattern of neurons, and then another part of your brain works the lungs and larynx to actually make the sound of it come out of your mouth. It turns out that when you think a particular word, that initial pattern flashes even if you don’t actually go on to say the word. Of course, this means that if we know what neural pattern matches to what word, someone could literally read your thoughts by scanning your brain activity. But I digress…

While that’s a technology for the future, all these things also got me thinking about the past, and how people’s thoughts must have been structured differently before language existed… it took a while, but we actually made some significant technological advances before we had any way of vocally expressing them to each other. Creating tools and fire and wheels, first of all. The only means at our disposal would have been showing by example. True, the advances in knowledge come faster when you can tell everyone how it works -- or even better, write it down -- but I wonder if it comes at a price. We’re now so used to hearing spoken language in our heads and before our eyes, we might be cutting ourselves off from having these language-less flashes of inspiration. Clearly, they do come, but maybe they don’t come nearly as often. Then again, what good is brilliant inspiration if you can’t articulate it to anyone else?