Fuck You, Canada

I say this as a once-proud Canadian: fuck you, Canada.

Stephen Harper and his brigade of destroyers, again? A fucking majority? What could you possibly have been thinking, Canada? What the hell is wrong with you?

I know you’re not completely stupid, Canada. In the half of my 45 years that I lived there, I met lots of people who weren’t stupid. My mom, who’s mayor of my hometown: she’s one smart lady. But I’m not going to ask her if she voted Conservative. I fear her response would break my heart.

I don’t want you to apologize to me, Canada. That would be silly. But it will be heartbreaking when you come to me weeping, with fresh bruises across your face, because you believed him when he said he wouldn’t hit you any more, and you went back. Again. For the sake of the kids.

I don’t want to feel a tingle of schadenfreude when I see the smoking, cratered economic wasteland after the Great Real Estate Disaster that is coming, Canada, your people shambling and blistered, draped in scorched rags, clutching the tattered paperwork for your 40 year mortgages, or for you to learn a lesson about greed from that.

I don’t want you to be the nation I so loved when I was a boy, the country I was so proud of.

I don’t want you to wake up and realize that by emulating the worst, you become the worst. America’s so exciting, so vibrant, they have the best drugs and the shapeliest fake tits, the shiniest teeth and the porn, have you seen some of that crazy porn they make down there? And the great big servings of curly fries? Holy shit! Everybody loves America, except that Bin Laden creep, and hell, they finally took him down Rambostyle, right? So all aboard the USA train!

Those boring frigid Scandinavian countries, where they have the highest standard of living, the best education and health care, the lowest infant mortality rate, even — who needs all that? Who wants to be like them, all dour and shivering and strong and secure and beloved, when America! is just next door and has that flashy car and gold tooth?

I don’t want you to look in the mirror and realize you’ve become a disappointment, an also-ran, a minor-key sidekick to a lumbering misguided giant, a mockery of the great men and women who built you. I don’t need you to understand that the toxic Network News American Political Buzzword Culture that has colonized your media and infected your discourse has distracted your people and corrupted your leaders and is destroying you. I don’t want you to embrace the principles that made you great. I don’t want you to take a step back and think about what kind of nation you want to be, and then live up to those principles.

No, wait, what the hell am I saying?

I want all of those things.

But it looks less likely with every turn of the screw that I’ll ever be seeing them.

Nerds and Otaku and Geeks, Oh My!

I just read Patton Oswalt’s Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die, which I enjoyed, and I’ve got something to say. Several somethings, in fact. As I set out, I’m not entirely certain what those somethings are, but I’m sure we’ll have some fun finding out.

I’m a little uncomfortable with it as a semi-serious piece of word stuff, and with the inevitable ensuing Metafilter thread. Underlying everything is an assumption that goes for the most part unquestioned: that nerds, or geeks (or otaku, but to hell with that, William Gibsonisms notwithstanding

The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.

because I’m weary so weary of the appropriation and repurposing of poorly-understood Japanese words) are to be defined by the cultural products they (possibly obsessively) consume. It’s the common usage, sure — we talk about star wars nerds and comics nerds, about gaming geeks and movie geeks. We’ve wired into our brains a default mode where a nerd is someone who nerds out over some New Bauble, and a geek geeks out about their Precious Thing. We’re a little too accustomed to defining ourselves by what we consume, which is just what The Business of Entertainment wanted. Except for that whole part where we can get almost anything made of information these days without really trying. Or paying.

Patton frames it as the end of cultural scarcity, of that which was hidden being revealed, of the death of a certain degree of cultural outsider self-worth being eroded by the internet. When it was harder to get to those obscure bands and movies and comics and all the rest, the idea is, the honest work of digging down to those rich veins of geek gold was something in which pride could be taken. Now, when the nuggets just litter the digital ground for anybody to pick up, the noble labor doesn’t seem so noble. Or at least not as laborious. A fundamental compensator for the social downsides of geekery has been knocked out of play at the same time as the tribes of the ’80s suddenly became nations.

Defining the geek or the nerd through the obscurity or scarcity of the cultural detritus they cherish doesn’t work very well when, like Patton, it’s Star Wars merch and mythos they loved, either. There wasn’t much more ubiquitous and mainstream than Star Wars in the late 70s and early 80s, even in my frontier village. Hell, George Lucas practically invented the crass movie-merch tie in. Then again, he’s right about comics back in the day — the trip to the corner shop every few weeks to check for new comics when I was 10 or 12, turning that metal rack and wondering how many my mom would let me buy was a cherished and exciting ritual. And music — well, let’s just say that the one store that stocked records in my hometown, the K-Mart, didn’t stock a lot of The Clash, let alone more obscure stuff. Without radio other than CBC, the world of new music was entirely closed off, and when a friend lent me a vinyl copy of London Calling that he’d gotten in Vancouver, back when I was 16, I almost exploded with the love of it.

The K-Mart did have Monty Python records, though. I didn’t realize that there even was a television program, and it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I’d seen all the episodes. And there were bookstores in Prince George, a couple of hours away, where I could and did buy science fiction novels by the dozen, until I was 15 or so.

So there’s that. There is truth to the idea that back in the days of the turn of the ’80s (now nearly as far in the past as the end of WWII was to me then, a realization that makes my heart thud for a few seconds like it’s pumping crude oil), especially if you didn’t live in a city, even more so if, like me, you lived far far off in the hinterlands, the very scarcity of music that wasn’t disco, of movies that weren’t mainstream, of pretty much anything that you couldn’t find in the tiny book corner of the Hudson’s Bay, well, it made all those things more precious, in part because it took work to get them. And that work set you apart, gave some measure of pride and feeling of superiority, and inclined you to try and find other people to share those precious artifacts with.

My experience may have been different, because there just weren’t enough kids at a given age in my hometown for ironbound cliques and subcultures to accrete. With 50 kids in my class, and so maybe a total in the entire town of 150 or so with a three-year age span, almost everyone was a little from column A, a little from column B, and a little from all the rest.

But I’m not sure that any of that has more than just a degree of overlap with geekery or nerddom. Patton talks about Geek Culture as if it were a thing that existed in the 1980s and has mutated into something new now, and I reckon (perhaps because of my isolation, I admit) that we’re talking about two different things Then and Now. Was there an actual geek subculture back then? There were geeky and nerdy individuals, yes, small tribes, sure, even larger collectives (I remember when my mom took me and a buddy to my first science fiction convention, when I was 13 or so, I think), in the larger cities, all collecting around different emergent cultural nodes.

I think that an enormous range of personality types, from the obsessive and borderline autistic all the way to the hypersocial, nonconformist artsy type got shovelled into a huge pile under the geek/nerd rubrics, because they were, basically, different, not just in the things that amused them, but the way they related to those things, and the ways they interacted with the Great Everyone Else. There was a wild spectrum of subcultures, and the cost of entry to each in the unwired world was high enough that it was hard to partake in more than a couple of overlaps. There were weird hybrid metalhead D&D players, or stoner AV Club members, but not as many as there might have been. Subcultures were siloed.

What about today?

We’ve lived through a few decades in which popular culture has been infantilized, because that’s where the money was. It led, until the early part of the 2000s perhaps, to a cultural hell from which some are now emerging, wiping the ichor from our foreheads, but in which most folks are still eyeballs deep. But now, because it’s all free, and if not always legal, at least available, and it’s the young people who have the skills to get to it… well, there’s not as much money there. The entertainment economy is a sinking Titanic for an increasingly large segment of the population, and it’s just these days tipping to the vertical — the air pockets will blast out through the stern, and it’ll sink faster than we can imagine. But that’s just fine, because those of us who know how (yes, the geeks and nerds of old, at least the ones who emerged from the chrysalis of the last 20 years) will find a vast, rich field of flotsam, and we’ll build rafts, and it’ll be better than before.

I think we’ve been duped, to be honest. Several different things have been happening at the same time over the past few decades, and at the same time as the world is completely different, it’s just the same, and will ever be, for most. I think that part of Patton’s problem (which, I’m sure, he’s mostly joking about) is mostly that, like me, he’s a bit old now, and it’s hard to view the way of things through new eyes.

So what’s happened? Well, the Business of Selling Entertainment Products has gotten bigger, meaner, and more sophisticated. Cool-hunters track down the latest youth trends and their corporate masters commoditize them as quickly as they can. Advertising has become a terrifyingly exact science, and arrows in to tickle our lizard brains with ever-increasing accuracy. We are at the same time more sophisticated in understanding how the marketers manipulate us, and less resistant to being manipulated, because most of us have given up. The price of etc etc is eternal vigilance, after all, and that’s hard work. We know that television news has become a business more than a service, that advertising pays for it, that viewers are needed for higher ad sales rates, that conflict and drama, manufactured or otherwise, brings viewers, and so the news transforms into formalized drama and artificial conflict pumping, and we don’t really care.

We talk unironically about how clever or amusing or just plain wonderful the latest TV ad is, we scarcely notice, and even applaud, when a much-loved song is bought and used as the soundtrack, which was a shock and affront back in the day. Suggestions that ubiquitous advertising can be a pernicious influence are regularly met with derision by otherwise smart people who argue that ads are somehow a service that support precious freedom of choice, and drive product innovation and improvement. We watch democracy become a contest between which candidate can muster the bigger war chest and spend the most on advertising and image management. We accept that lobby groups and corporate campaign donors have more influence on our elected representatives than the citizenry does.

Form has taken precedence over function. The ritual of consumption, the kabuki drama of news telecasts, the hollow ceremony of democratic participation; we focus on appearance over result, we put our feet onto the dance-school-floor outlines over and over again, believing that the result has to be different this time, and it almost never is.

In case the thrust of what I’m saying here has gotten obscured: many dollars are spent by increasingly effective advertisers, marketers and public relations shills, by companies and governments and every other entity who wants something from us, whose ability to finger the proper chords in our brains have spiralled skyward to keep pace with our collective ability to resist them. I don’t think this is a good thing.

That’s the first thing that’s been happening. Some days it seems like most people in the developed world don’t know, don’t care, can’t be fucking bothered that the process, deliberate or otherwise, of herding us into positions of collective consumerist impotence is nearly complete. It’s too much work not to trust what The Famous and Powerful and The Companies tell us. Just getting by is hard enough these days. The news fails to explain why that is and how to avoid getting trapped into debt slavery, and all the while the credit card ads pander to our cupidity, the latest gadget tempts, and the politicians further marginalize anyone who isn’t rich enough to buy their way clear. News outlets get consolidated into megacorps, opinion becomes fact, and we’re talking about whether the latest coked-out starlet is going to jail or not. The media, the entertainment industry, has been complicit. No conspiracies, just the eternal chase for the almighty payoff.

People outside the developed world have more important things to worry about, of course.

But there’s been a countering trend of a sort, a backlash that would have been impossible without another large and important thing that has happened. That’s your swell pal the internet, and the internet has, of course, changed everything. Patton’s Everything That Ever Was — Available Forever is coming. It’s almost here. I can smell it, and it smells like hot plastic. And it’ll be great, at least until there’s a bout of solar turbulence or the magnetic poles of the Earth flip again or something, and the world’s magnetic media gets wiped.

We’ve all had enough of the utopian internet-will-fix-everything wanking that almost exclusively occurs — surprise — on the internet, from me and from everyone else. I won’t bother; either you’re with me that having information access to Everything Everywhere Always is a good thing (with many possible unforeseeable consequences for us as a species), or not. But I do think that the new skills that we’re developing, even us old bastards, the ones that wired youth take for granted, have changed the landscape.

And a new kind of schism has developed to replace the simple geeknerd/normal polarity switch from the 1980s and earlier.

There are still a lot of people out there who belly up to their media buffet, who suck down the advertising blandishments, who consume their culture in much the same way as most people did 20 or 30 years ago. It’s just more-ish, and spicier. And the factories that pack the feed pipes are happy to keep the sluices running, as long as there are dollars to be made. For lots of folks, digestion generally happens without an excess of critical thought, without worrying too much about the why or how of it: with an underlying assumption that because it’s there, somebody must have decided that it must not be bad for us. I understand the impulse: who doesn’t want to switch of their brain sometimes and just coo and nurse from the Ellisonian glass teat? I don’t begrudge most folks their habitual blitheness; I envy it. It’s what we miss from when we were children, when we believed we could trust and accept everything our parents told us as unalloyed truth, because unalloyed truth is a comforting thing. It’s the impulse that leads many to religion. It is human nature.

It is also one of the reasons for the spectacular crash of the housing industry in America, and the global economic tremors and aftershocks that continue, four years later: Americans believed that they were being told true things when their president trumpeted the ‘ownership society’, when the TV told them housing prices always go up, when their bank or mortgage company said that a zero-down ARM was a safe thing to do, that interest rates would stay low forever, and so on.

It’s sharks all the way down, and once we start, we are doomed to endlessly jumping them. The lies are fractal, they’re self-similar at all scales; perception beats reality, spin über alles. Unless you read even a few Important Internet Opinions to try and triangulate the truth.

There is a smaller group who have learned to be suspicious of ads, suspicious of corporations, or banks, of governments, of anyone trying to sell them something, who have met the increasing sophistication of the Marketing Mind Worms with their own more sophisticated defenses. These people have always been with us, but they are increasingly marginalized as out of touch, soft-headed crypto-hippies, or co-opted by batshit insane groups like the Tea Party in America (who at least ask some of the right questions, like how and why a bailout of the banks benefits ordinary people, but come up with wildly wrong answers, because the few voices they choose to trust have themselved been co-opted by oligarchs and liars).

There is an even smaller group — but large, and growing — who have taken to the digital world like a wonderchicken to the bottle, who have meta’d themselves bootstrapwise into an entirely new kind of human. And they don’t give a damn where their Stuff comes from; if it’s quality it’s grist for the mill, even better if there’s some nerd cred to it, and they might drop some dollars on it. If not, who cares — it’s free, anyway, and mockery of the mainstream is good fun. Like the nerds and geeks and dorks and dweebs (and other highschool epithets from the 80s) they may have odd, arcane interests, they may be creative, they may have 1000 friends online and none, or 1000, in real life, they may be gamers, they may feel some compulsion to edit Wikipedia or, ahem, build websites, they may be porn-addicted or furries, they may be /b/tards DDOSing Mastercard, they may be your freaking grandma, but they are connected and less and less inclined to apologize for their little obsessions and passing fancies. They share entertainment interests with everyone else — they watched Avatar, they played Call of Duty, they get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert — but they’re as likely to give you a quick dissertation on Serbian film directors or the provenance of the 8-bit-inspired art design in Minecraft as an opinion about Glee.

There are growing numbers of people — some motivated by resentment at being manipulated, some by the media garbage that they are given to eat by the Big Producers, some by the new availability of everything, everywhere, legally or not, some by contrarianism and sheer cussedness, and some, sure, by a deep and abiding otakularity — who aren’t the good customers of the entertainment industry they once might have been. Their viability as ongoing revenue streams, to borrow the language of our corporate masters, has been compromised.

They aren’t, in other words, the Norm-Minus geeks of the 80s (no matter how much we want to romanticize nostalgically about it, the epithets meant just that), they are Norm-Plus. Sure, there are the basement-dwelling masturbators and the odd and halting and otherworldly, and there always will be. But who would have thought that the first real info-war of the 21st century would be launched by 4chan /b/tards against credit card companies over online release of ‘secret’ government documents? Not me, but I find it thrilling. Anonymous are, for better or worse, a vanguard of the new nerds, the geeks, and they are at one and the same time no different from grandpa geeks like me and an instantiation something entirely new that has supplanted the old categories.

Let me give you a little Bruce Sterling, from his recent piece on Julian Assange and the splendid Wikileaks saga:

While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, his too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.

He didn’t just insult the captain of the global football team; he put spycams in the locker room. He showed the striped-pants set without their pants. This a massively embarrassing act of technical voyeurism. It’s like Monica and her stains and kneepads, only even more so.

Now, I wish I could say that I feel some human pity for Julian Assange, in the way I do for the hapless, one-shot Bradley Manning, but I can’t possibly say that. Pity is not the right response, because Assange has carefully built this role for himself. He did it with all the minute concentration of some geek assembling a Rubik’s Cube.

These are the new geeks, the new nerds, the empowered, the proud, the connected. The world has changed. And geeks and nerds are no longer merely about consumption and fetishization of obscure (or mainstream) cultural products. It’s not odd or geeky these days to be into Doctor Who, or to have an opinion on whether Han shot first. Pretty much everyone old enough does. It may have been a badge of subcultural achievement to be a role-playing gamer back in the day; now it’s just one of the things that people do. We identify with a spectrum of tribes, and we carve out our own identity in doing so.

There’s no need to kill Geek Culture — it barely exists as a thing anymore, and it’s dying of senescence at about the same rate that middle-aged guys like me and Patton are dying off. A new paradigm breaches the amniotic sac, lifts its bloody head, and wails. The new Gnerds arise!

The Ape and The Snake

The men who planned and carried out the bombings in Bali in 2002, the ones that killed one of my oldest and dearest friends (but only after he suffered with burns over most of his body for nearly two weeks) along with 201 other people, were executed last month.
You’d think I’d be happy about that.
Let me tell you a little story that may not seem to have much to do with this, but does, somehow, in a way that’s not entirely clear to me. Maybe in the telling, I can work it out a bit.
It was the mid-70s, I think, another glorious short clean summer in Northern BC, one of the ones that stay with me in my memory, and my aunt, uncle and two cousins were visiting us.
We had taken our river boat ten or fifteen kilometers up the lake, up to one of the rocky beaches under the ridge of Mount Pope, inshore from Battleship Island. We set up our outpost on a long expanse of thumb-size pebbles rattling under a broad unclouded vault of sky, stands of jackpine and spruce at our backs clustered beardlike around yellow stone cliff outcroppings. Clear deep dark green water, hot dogs cooked on whittled birch sticks over a fire pit. It was the kind of day that makes you feel glad to be alive, especially when you’re 8 or 10 years old and all is right with the world.
I remember at one point my cousins and I were ranging up the shingly beach, just exploring, when we came across the biggest snake I’d ever seen. It was glistening and black and in the water, and it took off like a shot as soon as it saw us, undulating frantically as it headed along the rocky verge, trying to escape.
We were curious, or at least I was, and we started throwing driftwood and rocks in its path, trying to get it to turn around, or slow down, so we could get a better look. I’m not sure, of course, what my cousins were thinking, but I don’t think they had any more malicious intent than I did. We were curious. The missiles we hurled at the poor beast got progressively larger and we got more excited, and the inevitable happened. One of the rocks or sticks landed square on the snake, and killed it. It uncoiled and floated, light belly up.
As we’d been hollering and chasing the snake, my uncle, presumable alerted by our excitement, had come up behind us just as the fatal stone did its work. All he saw was hooting boys killing an innocent creature.
He wasn’t furious, he was disgusted, disappointed. I still remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the look on his face. I don’t think anyone had ever looked at me like that before.
Several people have sent me links to news items about the execution of the Bali bombers in the past few weeks, and each time, I’ve had to tell them that I just didn’t know what to feel about it, much less what to think.
I find as I grow older that every year I am certain about less and less.
I’ve said to some folks who asked that although I do not believe that more killing is a good response to killing, if I were handed the gun, or set down in front of the switch behind the one-way glass, or just put into a room with the bastards, I wouldn’t hesitate to exact vengeance for the death of my friend. Pull the trigger, press the button, beat them with my fists. I’ve said to my friends that I am an ape masquerading as a man.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, I really don’t. It sounds good, I suppose, and I’ve always been about the dramatic pronouncement over the measured interpretation.
Is the world a poorer place without my friend Rick Gleason living in it? Yes, it is, and the same is no doubt true for the friends and family members of each and every of the other 201 people killed in the bombings. Is the world a better place without their killers living in it? I think it probably is.
We tell ourselves a lot of stories about ‘the sanctity of human life’. We seem to mean the lives of those we know and love when we talk about it, and that’s not surprising or wrong. We find it hard to care about strangers, and harder to care about strangers whose tribe is different, and even harder to care about those strangers who would do us harm if they could, or leave us to die without compunction. People get all misty about their Jesus and his injunctions to love one’s enemies and turn cheeks.
But we don’t really believe that human life, in the abstract, is sacred, even if we’re willing to go the extra mile and define what we mean by sacred, do we? Not really. We make war, we ignore the roots of violent crime and turn away, we spend millions on blood-fiesta movies and video games and tell ourselves that it’s about catharsis. The best we can reasonably claim to believe is that some human life is sacred.
We’re not bad people, of course, most of us. Actual, personal violence we find shocking, unacceptable, abhorrent. We are traumatized by the headless corpse behind the steering wheel sitting in the puddle of blood and piss in the twisted plastic and metal of the Friday night wreck. We’re dutifully frightened by the TV news items about violent crime that are intended to keep us dutifully frightened and at home watching the sponsor’s messages. But we do love our serial killers and the movies about them, we love our torture porn, we love our Schwarzeneggerian one-liners before the shotgun skullpop, even while we guard our vulnerable citizens against violence domestic and corporal and sexual and even emotional. We righteously and rightfully do our best to end the social conditions that allow such things to happen. And we support our troops. You know, if we have any. We compartmentalize.
I don’t think most of us are all that clear on these things, and I suppose I’m no better than anyone else.
See, if we admit that by executing those bastards, and we accept that violence has its place in our attempts to make the world better, we have accepted that violence has its place. This has consequences.
And if we’re not trying to make the world better, then we’re just acting out another episode of the woeful old Jehovahriffic vengeance.
I’m not against vengeance, though I’d rather be a man than an ape. I have to admit that there are times when I want to bare my yellowed fangs and rip out a throat and feel the hot pulse of blood wash across my cheek.
Thirty years later, having returned to the memory many times over the years, I don’t think I wanted to kill that snake. But I’m not certain that that was actually the truth at the time.

My Home Is Dying

When you grow up in the far north in Canada, if you’re at all curious about the world and the people in it, you can’t wait to get out. As soon as you’re able, you head out to the big city, for work or school or whatever you can get. It isn’t such a different story from kids growing up in the boonies anywhere, where it’s Montana or Gangwon-do in Korea, western New South Wales or the Cyclades.
I grew up, for the years that counted at least, in Fort Saint James, British Columbia. During those years — the early 70′s to the early 80′s — it was the End of The Road. Vanderhoof was the asshole of the world and we were forty miles up it, we said, recycling that old standby. The paved highway ended in the Fort, and to go further north meant logging roads and endless washboard and pothole gravel, dusty in summer, solid ice in winter, and slicker than snot the rest of the time. There were a couple of reservations further up there, and a few scattered fishing lodges and mines and logging camps. Wilderness, though, for the most part. Endless dense forest carpetting mountains, nap worn smooth in spots by crystal-clear cold lakes and rivers. Germanson Landing. Takla Landing. Leo Creek. Deese Lake. I’d like to say I hunted bear in these places wearing nothing but a breechclout and bowie knife, but with parents who were grappling with living on the frontier after moving from southern Ontario and a little shellshocked by family tragedy, the names of these tiny, isolated places were almost as exotic to me as Tokyo or Timbuktu. We didn’t stray too far.
But our own tiny town of 2500 or so was frontier enough for anyone, and, in what feels all these decades later like a deliberate, considered balance to the more bookish side of my nature, but was probably just imposed on me by the environment, I spent a lot of my time outdoors. In the summer especially, I’d spend 5 or 6 hours a day just behind our house swimming in the cold runoff-fed waters of Stuart Lake, or buckling on my first-gen Sony Walkman and riding my bicycle further and further out along the limited network of paved roads that snaked out along it, or to the south towards Vanderhoof, or the 10 or 15 kilometers north to the saw mills, after which the asphalt just stopped. Looking for something.
The trees never ended. The trees were everywhere. There were some things, growing up, that seemed limitless in their supply, overabundant, somehow both comforting and a little obnoxious in their insistence on being a part of every experience you could have: the trees, the water, and the snow. Nobody, or at least no young people that I knew, ever entertained for a moment the possibility that these things weren’t eternal, perpetual, guaranteed. We were ants on a golf course, surrounded by plenty, living the good life, and occasionally cursing the sprinklers.
For my part, I was one of those young people — and by no means was I in the majority — who couldn’t wait to get out, and once out, stayed. But I was also in a minority of the escapees, I think, in that I loved the place, even before I left. I’d read enough science fiction as a preteen to know that the dystopian extrapolations of scorched and dusty futures were based on the lives that people in more populous and less resource-blessed places were living already. I wasn’t all that keen to hunker down or bunker up.
I was afraid in a weirdly longing way of the nukes we assumed would soon be sailing along gravity’s rainbow, even if I was confident that up there in the North we’d be relatively unscathed by the coming armageddon. But I loved the sulphurous mineral rich town water that stained porcelain orange. I loved the thunderstorms that rolled in from the west over the 60 kilometre expanse of the lake, the bloodsplash summer forest fire sunsets, the northern lights you could almost hear, the way the hip-deep powdery snow creaked and puffed when the temperature got down to 40 below zero and your eyelashes began to freeze together. I loved the dusty evergreen smell of the trees and the rocks when we climbed up Mount Pope under flawless blue skies, I loved skindiving out to the drop-off in the lake, where the water, clear as air, grew dark and frightening, and my lungs felt ready to burst as I tried again and again to see what was down there, every minute irrationally terrified remembering the stories of giant sturgeon that had been pulled from those depths in decades past. I loved riding out on the lake in boats, and even riding on the river, even though that’s where my younger brother had died, in that fast dark water, when I was 6 years old. I loved blizzards and whiteouts, and waking up in the morning to see drifts of fresh snow that reached the roof of our house in beautiful mathematical arcs. I loved standing in our cold kitchen in my robe in the winter mornings before school while my mom made me breakfast, over the floor grate as the furnace blew hot air up my legs. I loved when the spring came and the roads and streets shed their dirty ice shells, and I could once again hop on my bicycle and prowl the streets, nose in the air smelling that good spring smell, hoping that maybe I’d see the girl I was in love with, but almost never seeing her. I loved the brief melancholy autumn smell of wet leaves in the freezing rain.
I didn’t fit in very well in many ways, though I tried, and once I began to drink — the official sport of Northern BC — it became much easier, and much as there were many people I loved and still love in that place, in some ways it was the place itself that made the greatest mark on me. I am and always will be someone who loves things green and blue and clean, and a smalltown boy who hauls out his big-city credentials and plays the global nomad urban expat sophisticate with a little reluctance.
I’ve been an expatriate most of the last 20 years and I’ll probably never live there again, but it will always be a huge part of who I am.
The reason our little town has existed and more or less thrived in the last century or so, though it was the first capital of British Columbia back in the fur trading goldrush days of the 19th century, has been the forestry industry. It’s a beautiful place, and tourists do come, but the lumber mills have always, at least in the last few lifetimes, provided something like 80% of the jobs, and powered an even larger component of the overall economy. It has been the same story for most of the small towns in the region. I worked in the mills too, bitching and moaning and drinking away the bruises, during my summer vacations from UBC, back in the 80′s. Taught me the value of hard work, and how much I don’t really care for it.
All that’s coming to an end. The trees are dying, and with them, the towns. It’s the pine beetle, you see. Just tiny little bugs. Nothing so dramatic as bombs or storms or ice caps melting away.
People like to debate the phenomenon of global climate change as if it were an academic issue. People who don’t live in the path of the huang-sa dust storms that sweep in out of China to blanket Korea every spring, and get worse with each passing year, people who aren’t in Central British Columbia watching 85% of the pine trees die off, and with the trees, the futures of their children. People whose health or livelihood isn’t directly affected.
But then again, those British Columbians aren’t entirely blameless, unlike the poor Koreans (and me) who are sucking down heavy metal-laden dust that we had no part in creating. While noting that the pine beetles are a natural part of the ecosystem, Canadian ecosuperhero (at least for my generation) David Suzuki blames forest fire suppression, clearcutting (and subsequent replanting), global warming. The first two can be laid directly at the feet of the folks who live there, whether they like to admit it or not.
The global warming part is textbook: to put it simply, as I understand it, warmer winters means reduced insect die off in the coldest part of the year, which means more of the little buggers the following season, and warmer temperatures the rest of the year means they spread further.
Forest fire suppression breaks the necessary cycle of old growth die off and renewal.
Clearcutting means huge areas are effectively denuded, and replanting with a single species of tree means a lack of biodiversity in the new forest, green as it may appear.
The bugs have rushed in as a result, and whole region is in very big trouble.
In the 6 years leading up to 2007 130,000 square kilometres of pine forest have been destroyed by the beetles. To put that number in perspective, that’s the area of the country of England, or about one and a half times the area of South Korea. It’s an armageddon all right, but not the kind that gave me nightmares when I was a teenager.
The irony to all this is that the massive die off of pines (and the infestation is moving to spruce, apparently) means, according to some researchers, that the forests of BC will no longer act as a carbon sink for the earth’s atmosphere, but by 2020 will become a carbon source, making the problems even worse. It wouldn’t be excesssive to describe this as a calamity. An area the size of a small country will be filled with standing kindling, which means forest fires will rage on a scale never before seen — imagine, again, the entire country of England aflame for a sense of the scale involved.
Imagine that.
And companies that practiced unsustainable clearcutting, and the successive governments that allowed it? A special circle of hell will hopefully be reserved for those bastards. You know, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Have a look at this, to get an idea what those greedy f–kers have done to my home, and to our collective heritage over the past few decades. First, what the forests around my hometown (it’s at the tip of Stuart Lake, there, center left) looked like in 1973, not long after my family moved there. Unbroken green, punctuated only by the blue of the northern lakes, and some farmland around Vanderhoof, down there at the lower left.

Now have a look at the same area in 1999. See the clearcuts? See what ‘stewardship of the resource’ has meant? See the spots, like some kind of mange, some horrific skin disease? Good job, you scum. You’ve burned your own house down around your ears. Thanks, American owners of Canadian forestry companies! You’ve screwed us again.

I have nothing against forestry. I have nothing against logging. It has been the lifeblood of the community that made me who I am, and supported people I know and love (and some I don’t care for so much, I admit.)
What I can’t and couldn’t ever ignore, yeah, even while I was sweeping up the damp rich sawdust for fifteen bucks an hour, is the ways in which it has been pursued. And now, finally, the bats are coming home to roost, and it will be decades before the province and the industry recovers. Next time, maybe, they’ll do it right. If there is enough fossil fuel left to do it, and any communities left to work there.
So what’s happening on the ground? Two years ago, when I last visited Canada, I drove a rented car from Vancouver the 1100km north to Fort Saint James. There were stretches of a hundred kilometres and more where every tree that lined the highway on either side, once stately and evergreen and immutable, was the dull reddish brown of standing deadwood. It was a terrible thing to see. My mother, who was mayor of Fort Saint James for 14 years and still lives there, painted a pretty gloomy picture when we last talked. Of the 4 lumber mills that have provided most of the economic steam to run the community for decades, two are out of business, and one, run by the native community, is limping along with about 50 employees. Young families are leaving in droves. Real estate prices are plummeting, and houses are standing empty. Last year was one of the best ever for tourism, and that will hopefully never change, but other towns in less beautiful areas are in the process of drying up and blowing away.
Trees take decades to grow in Northern British Columbia. The good times are not going to come back any time soon.
I don’t pay much attention to goings-on in Canada. I don’t know how much attention is being paid to this. I suppose people are too worried about the coming real estate bust in the cities. I suppose the economic boom and environmental nightmare of the oil sands in Alberta offers some distraction. I don’t know. But what I am sure about is that my hometown is dying.
I have mixed feelings.
The forests will come back. The forestry industry and government will, we can only hope, learn some lessons. People will relocate — Canada is a nation of migrants — and towns will shrink and maybe disappear. It’s probably just wishful thinking, but it would be nice to think that things will shift toward a real attitude of sustainability and stewardship.
No matter how it all plays out, a lot of people will be hurt in the process. It takes a lot of good to outweigh the pain that the end of a way of life brings.
It’s happening all over the world. They say change is good. They say a lot of stuff.
Update: The news is that a local (-ish) company has taken over the largest mill in Fort Saint James, the one that closed a year ago. They are aware and resigned to the fact that they will lose money for a good while, but they are focused on the long-term. This is fantastic news for the town — it means hundreds of jobs, and means the town will not dry up and blow away. Other towns may not be so lucky, but I am gratified that my hometown at least seems to be looking at a stay of execution.
Update 2, Fall 2010: My mother’s been mayor again after more than a decade out of the job — Mayor Sandy to the rescue! — and things, in part through good timing and in part through her political skills, have turned around to an almost astonishing degree. The downtown core has been revitalized and renovated, a new gold mine is going in north of town adding hundreds of new jobs and millions in new tax revenue and businesses, there’s not a single rental space available in town, and everything is humming the way it hasn’t since…. well, since the last time my mother was mayor, to be honest. While the rest of the region is undergoing severe economic difficulties stemming from the problems I talked about here, at least FSJ is weathering the storm. Even if I never end up back there — a vanishingly unlikely possibility — that’s still very comforting to know.

Here’s a pretty word cloud, in celebration:

Armageddon Schadenfreude

When I was a teenager, I thought a lot about the end of the world. In particular, the rain of nukes that always seemed just around the corner. I was fascinated and terrified. I suppose that’s not an unusual thing for kids that age, and might even have been the usual for m-m-m-my generation.
I grew up in the 70s, came of age in the early 80s. I was convinced that nuclear war was near-inevitable. I had no doubt that doddering dimwitted Ronald Reagan (read ‘his handlers’) and whichever doddering Soviet supremo was currently being propped up and jerkily animated with electric current (read ‘his handlers’) were going to blow the crap out the world. I dreamed about it. I can remember a grand total of one wet dream from my pubescent years; I can remember literally dozens of atomic holocaust dreams.
I remember Helen Caldicott and her Canadian-made If You Love This Planet. They showed it to us in high school. I remember the TV movies Threads and The Day After. Two and half decades after seeing Threads, I still remember the camera lingering on the puddle of urine at the woman’s feet as the mushroom clouds rose. I watched The Road Warrior when it was first released. I remember reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. I sucked up all the ’50s bomb-shelter paranoiac sci-fi juvenilia I could get my mother to buy for me at the bookstores on our shopping trips to the nearest city. I read what little I could find about the growth of the Cold War arsenals. It was… a hobby of mine.
Not that I was the archetypal Weird Kid or anything, muttering head-down through greasy locks about the ‘end of the world’. I had normal hobbies, too: comics and computers, swimming and biking, booze and friends’ fast cars. Girls. I showered regularly. But I did dream a lot about the end of the world.
And they weren’t all nightmares by any means. See, I grew up in a tiny town more than 1000 kilometers north of Vancouver. I was completely confident that when the bombs fell, we’d be safe and secure. When I was in Grade 5, my gifted-group teacher had had a meteorologist boyfriend who’d lent me (and the other smart kid they’d cut from the herd to study what and how we liked) his weather maps. I’d learned about the prevailing wind currents of north-central British Columbia. We’d be all good when the balloon went up. The nearest mushroom cloud might sprout and rain its deadly ash 500km away, at worst, accidental mistargetings notwithstanding, and leave us basically unscathed
We had moose and squirrel salmon, we had farms and ranches, we had endless forest. Fruit might get a little scarce, but hell, I didn’t much like fruit anyway. My house had a deep well, and the lakes and rivers were sweet and clear. Nuclear winter? No worries. We lived through -45°C spells every damn year. We’d get by. Let the mad bastards down south kill each other off en masse. We’d be the inheritors of the earth, us hardy northern canucks, ululating our diesel-powered ways down out of the arboreal wastes, antlers strapped to the hoods of our Barracudas and pickup trucks, to rebuild things in our own Royal Reserve-powered image. Proud Canadians. There’d finally be some kind of payoff for living 40 miles up the asshole of the earth for so many years.
Armageddon didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Not the best result in a lot of ways, sure, but Ouroboros the world-turd was spinning at the bottom of the bowl, anyway. Time for cleansing holy nuclear fire! It’d be a shame, all those innocent people getting torched, but we kept reading how overpopulation was going to kill the planet even if the nukes didn’t.
So talk these days of a coming economic armageddon with Ground Zero in America’s bubble have actually put me in a nostalgic mood. Headlines like China threatens ‘nuclear option’ of dollar sales take me right back to 1982. Media tidbits like Jim Cramer’s recent howling monkey-boy histrionic meltdown — ‘It’s Armageddon out there!” have fascinated me in the kind of way that (metaphorical) nuke-porn did back in the day.

It’s far from certain, of course, that the blow up is going to happen, or even that things will fall apart. But I’ve been watching the whole thing for years now, after decades of conditioned ignorance about economics, and the New Great Depression feels as likely to me as nuclear tennis did back in the early ’80s.
Then again, that didn’t end up happening, did it? There’s some comfort in that, I guess.
A comment from the perspicacious Malor in a recent Metafilter thread (among many others about the subprime mortgage mess, the yen carry trade, the liquidity dry-up, and all the rest) lays out genesis of the worst case scenario pretty well, I think. Is it a Minsky Moment? Yeah, probably.
Malor said:

We should have gone into a horrific recession after the stock market bubble popped in 2000. The size of that bubble was far bigger than the one in 1929, so the consequences should have been even more severe… something on the order of severity of the Great Depression, although I think a 1970s-style stagflation writ large was the likeliest outcome.
What happened instead is that the Fed panicked and hit the liquidity button, flooding the system with incredibly cheap money. New money chases inflation, and causes more of it, so it went into housing, and then people started leveraging themselves up into massive debt to buy more of it.
Bubbles have been called the fiscal equivalent of a nuclear weapon; the only way to avoid the fallout is by not having one in the first place. The stock market bubble was a huge deal, though probably survivable.
But the Fed, which set off the original bubble with easy money, tried to fix the fallout with more of the same medicine that got us sick in the first place. To stop the fallout from one atomic bomb, they set off two fusion weapons instead…. and we didn’t even dodge the fallout from the first bomb, we just delayed it. The explosion of the other two bombs just sent the fallout into orbit, but it’s still up there, and we’re still gonna eat every rad.
At the very least, we’re going to have a full generation of very hard times, tougher than anything in living memory. I think we will be exceptionally fortunate if the United States continues to exist as the same legal entity.
In terms of likely outcome, my operating theory is that we’ll go into a short-term deflationary crunch, but the Fed will open the floodgates and send us into an inflationary death spiral. Not just nasty horrible stagflation for two decades like we would have had from the Y2K pop, but an actual hyperinflationary death spiral for the dollar.
With fiat currency, I just don’t think a true deflationary collapse is possible… although with the unbelievably massive leverage in the derivative positions, I suppose it could happen. Money could be destroyed from debt default faster than the Fed can lend new dollars into circulation.
There’s one name you should remember in the coming crisis: Greenspan. This is all his doing. His refusal to ever allow a recession, ever, led us directly into this mess. He never met a problem he couldn’t cover up with liquid paper.

I think Malor might be overstating the case when he talks about a generation of hard times. On the other hand, if China pulls the economic trigger, he might be understating it.
Anyway, the winds taste the same to me because as the tension builds I’m once again far from the places where the corpses will litter the ground if and when the hammer falls. Two and half decades ago I was in the far north of Canada, confident that we’d be able to sustain ourselves while the rest of the world went to hell. Now I’m in Korea, and if economic armageddon happens, once again I’m not directly in the line of fire. Once again, if it all goes to hell, I’ll feel sorry for all the people (even the stupid ones who went for their two year no-money-down teaser-rate no-declare ARM mortgages for a McMansion they knew they couldn’t afford) who lose it all. The rich will make it through, as they always do, this time with Bushy legislation and offshore accounts rather than hardened bunkers and hidey holes.
Well, I like to say I’ll feel sorry about the end of days. I said to myself when I was 17 that I’d be sorry about all those crispy corpses down in CanadAmerica South. But not entirely sincere the sentiment, I have to admit, then or now. The truth is, of course, in some ways, on some days: I think I’d feel like pumping my fist, taking a deep breath, and shouting ‘That’s what you get for shortsighted greed and systematic stupidity, you bastards!’ Or more succinctly, ’cause my wind is not what it once was, ‘Suck it, dummies!’
I’m a bad man that way. Or part of me is and was, at least.
Bad things are going to happen to the Korean economy, certainly, if and when America’s economy goes tits-up and takes the rest of the world with it. But if I lived in North America, if I was mortgaged to the hilt, if I was living from paycheck to paycheck, I’d be a lot more worried about it than I am here in Korea with my life savings in won and no debt.
Maybe we ought to buy some gold, though.
So I am back where I was when I was young — a cleansing fire might just be what’s needed to clean out the corruption and cauterize the wounds. Part of me almost looks forward to it. I’m not sure if I really believe that, or if it’s just the romantic teen I was surfacing again for a last misanthropic gasp before he goes down into that dark cold water for the last time.
Either way: armageddon schadenfreude. It’s not just a good name for a postmodern superhero.
[Update: more background material and some excellent explanations of the IMPENDING DOOOOOOOM in this MeFi thread.]

Not A Howl, A Twitter

[Some of this seemed to crystallize for me after listening to Bruce Sterling's excellent talk at SXSW 2007. So thanks to him, and you know, grain of salt.]
We grew up watching. If you’re 50 or 40 or 30 or younger, you’ve spent thousands of hours watching. You still watch — you watch on YouTube, or you watch your DVDs, or you watch the TV. Maybe you use a PVR to timeshift yourself so that you can watch on your own schedule, congratulate yourself on cheating the advertisers, denying them the eyeballs they crave. Maybe, like me, you fire up bittorrent on boot, and swarmload all your video automagically from the RSS feeds of illicit darknet bulletin boards.
Howl Twitter (with abject apologies to Allen Ginsberg)

I saw the best posters of my generation destroyed by blogging, commenting hysterical naked,
scrolling themselves through the n-word threads at dawn looking for a snarky fix,
trucker-hatted hipsters burning for the cheapest DSL connection to the bitwise dynamo in the datastream of night,
who pizza and tater-tots and poopsocking and high sat up typing in the supernatural whiteness of rented condos surfing across the tubes of internets contemplating porn,
who bared their breasts on MySpace under fake names and saw Mohammedan bombers threatening in video streams illuminated,
who played through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Second Life and Warcraft tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were banned from the websites for crazy & posting batshitinsane on the Windows™ of Mr Bill,
who farted in unshaven rooms in underwear, tossing their tissues in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror on CNN…

Watching and being watched has started to feel like the default human state in these mediated days. You know how characters in video games will go into their idle animation if you wait too long to interact with them? Yeah, like that. Unwatched, they nonetheless go through the motions as if they were.
The last half a century or more is remembered, at least by me, as a succession of moving images — lumpy raspberry red Kennedy brains sprayed out across the trunk of the convertible, phallic twin towers collapsing like nationscale erectile dysfunction. Watching makes manifest our reality, makes more real our memory. Two or three generations now, we’ve been immersed eyedeep in it. Hawkeye Pierce and Fonzie, they’re signifiers of my childhood as evocative to me as cold lake water and the northern lights. If you spend as much time on the internet as I do, if you’re one of the geek-approved flavour of obsessive-compulsives we call ‘early adopters’, if you’ve bought a big flat panel TV or covet HD video, if your appetite for bandwidth is insatiable, if you feel compelled to buy ever more complex mobile phones, you’re probably in the same boat as me. You swim in the same advertising cesspool in which our media meals float — eyeballs watch, watching is intentional, intention means awareness, awareness is all when someone wants something from you or when you want something from them. Tree falls in the forest, but it doesn’t matter shit unless somebody’s watching. We’re Schrödinger and his cat, both at the same time.
If you live in London, your picture is taken 300 times a day, but not because someone want to sell you something. You’re being watched, and you’re meant to feel safe.
We’ve had another lesson drummed in to us, too, it seems; one that cuts in the other direction. It’s a weak inverse solipsist lesson we felt in our bones from the time we were toddlers, of course: you’ve seen it on America’s Funniest Home Videos, maybe. The child falls, howls while the parents with the camera are looking at him and pointing the camera. They move off, out of sight — the observing eye umbrated — and the child quiets, sniffs, draws shuddery breath, and follows. As soon as he knows he is once more in the range of the observer’s gaze, he busts out into full wails again.
Here: It’s easier for you to watch the video than for me to explain it. Watch.

Our thoughts, our feelings, our selves are never as real as when someone else is observing them.
So we used to make home movies, we took Polaroids, we sent cards to distant relatives at Christmas so we’d be alive in their minds. It’s a natural and a human impulse. Hell, we painted on the walls of Lascaux. With the technology at hand, we were only able to do it occasionally. We laughed at the Japanese tourists back in the 1970′s who lugged cameras around and photographed everything. Remember those jokes? Me, I’m in some Japanese family’s album somewhere because they asked me in pantomime to pose with them, back in 1976 in Banff, presumably because I was wearing a sweatshirt with a big red maple leaf and Olympics logo.
We’re rubberneckers slowing down to peer at the wreckage flung from the dizzying welter of ‘reality TV’ programs, where it is purported that we are watching ordinary people raised up or struck down by our collective whim or their own strengths and failings, willing participants watchers and watched alike, sanctified and made flesh by the power of our collective gaze. American Idols are made of people! Barechested rednecks are hilarious and a little sad, reminding us of what me might have been, at least on Cops. Oh, man, that’s clever: those fat bastards on the Biggest Loser aren’t really losers at all, are they? It goes on and on.

[ripper] I told u I was hardcore

Larger than life as we bask in the collective gaze starts to feel like a necessary platform of life services to achieve Normal, to stand out from the undifferentiated herd in the way that we’ve been told we should by companies who want us to buy their products. But buying those jeans whose commercials identically mass-marketed the promise of individualist flair to everybody just doesn’t carry the same cachet any more for us media-steeped folks. We’ve gotten too smart and self-aware for that, some of us.

Bud: Look at ‘em, ordinary f–king people, I hate ‘em.

And so online journals like this very one you’re reading right now, and the canonical cheese sandwich post. So weblogs, where what we’ve seen is posted, so that others can see it, and then go and see the thing seen. So audioscrobbling. So Second Life. So YouTube. So MySpace. So Flickr, where we can upload cellphone pics minute-by-minute, if we want. So Odeo and Twitter. So new, so immediate: so we spread the minutiae of our minute-to-minute existence out over the wires, so that others — someone — will notice and pay attention. We are alive to reality when we watch, we feel more real when we are paid in the attention-currency of attentive eyes.
I’m thinking it’s a new pornography of the self. We willingly prostitute our privacy, and we accept payment in the form of attention. We always have, of course. But the slickly sexy 2.0 toolset we have makes it so effortless, and the reward such a crackpipe hit of Warholian fame, that it’s hard to know when to stop. We become gleeful self-pornographers.

The word originally signified any work of art or literature depicting the life of prostitutes. Though pornography is clearly ancient in origin, its early history is obscure because it was customarily not thought worthy of transmission or preservation. Nevertheless, in the artwork of many historic societies, including ancient India, ancient Greece, and Rome, erotic imagery was commonplace and often appeared in religious contexts. The Art of Love, by Ovid, is a treatise on seduction and sensual arousal. The invention of printing led to the production of ambitious works of pornographic writing intended to entertain as well as to arouse. In 18th-century Europe, pornography became a vehicle for social and political protest through its depiction of the misdeeds of royalty and other aristocrats, as well as those of clerics, a traditional target. The development of photography and motion pictures in the 19th and 20th centuries contributed greatly to the proliferation of pornography, as did the advent of the Internet in the late 20th century.

And as we do so, we live less in the actual moment, perhaps, less with the actual people around us. We don’t need to seek out people to be with us here, to be our audiences: if we post, they will come, or at least their eyes will, we hope. Do we lose more than we gain? I don’t know the answer to that.
Maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon. I don’t use instant messaging and other ‘presence apps’, I don’t carry a cell phone. I have no desire for people to know what I’m doing and when, and I don’t care to be at anyone’s beck and call when I am enjoying being alone. Or any other time, for that matter.
I certainly don’t think that it’s all bad, all this Twittering and Flickring, all this eyeball mongering. I have nothing against prostitution, in principle. But we may underestimate what it’s done to us, and what it’s doing. And I wonder what it will mean for people who have never known anything different.
[Update: Hey, Bruce liked my Ginsberg repurposing! And so the circle is complete.]