v-2.org

Enough.

Enough with the e-books, with the location-based digital services, enough with the .whatever initiatives and the Bluetooth-equipped shoes.

I suppose it's rather ungrateful for someone whose entire livelihood is predicated on an information economy with a high technology base to be saying this, but I need a break from all of it. I need some time to consolidate, to absorb, and finally, to choose.

I'm going to inch out onto a limb and guess that what I'm experiencing is not merely a personal feeling of option fatigue, but a culture-wide lassitude when confronted with an unabating tide of new technological gadgetry.

I'm not talking about future shock. I don't precisely feel whiplashed by any of the technosocial developments of the last five years, and I'm betting you don't either. I mean, yes, it's nothing short of a miracle that due to the Amazing Internet I'm writing this article in a Starbucks in Tokyo and you're reading it in a Peet's a million miles away.

But come on. The Internet is - conceptually, anyway - 1970s technology. This is yesterday's news, not nearly enough to trigger the sense of nauseous, white-knuckled vertigo I think of as true future shock. Where indisputably revolutionary technology is concerned, as Brother James once pointed out, there "ain't nothing going on but the rent."

a formless miasma of dread

So we're not talking about fear of the new. No, what I'm feeling is just a premonitory aura of dread at having to deal with a deluge of more pointless devices and services: something more akin to the feeling one gets when the holidays roll around every year and you confront the idea of seeing your relatives again.

There's a guy at my company here in Tokyo, a young Japanese go-getter who's currently working on kind of a lifeclock for one of our clients, a major provider of digital mobile phone services. The idea is to identify all of the possible "touch points" for this client's product in your life, as your roles and activities shift throughout the day - at seven-thirty AM, you're a sleeper in need of a wakeup call, at eight-thirty a commuter who's looking for transit information, at two in the afternoon a knowledge worker waiting on data, at six that evening a young woman on the town who wants movie times or the location of the nearest Ethiopian restaurant with a full liquor license.

Once every touch point has been identified for the desired target audience, this dude (and I use that word advisedly) proposes that the client offer a service to match, using their phones as the delivery platform. I suppose the idea is that life will be so much better when it's almost totally mediated by a handy pocket-sized device.

This is a prospect he's genuinely enthusiastic about. He has a habit of holding up his keitai (cellphone) at company meetings, as if it were some totemic signifier of All Tomorrow's Parties. Given half a chance, he'll hold forth hourslong about all the inestimable good that will flow downstream from this brave new age of eCRM, whatever that is.

my aim is nothing

Maybe he's right. As I write these words, I'm looking across the room at a gorgeous young chiquita whiling away her Saturday morning sipping an overpriced latte and tapping something into her keitai one painstaking phoneme at a time. She doesn't look unhappy. Maybe she'd welcome yet another degree of technological intervention in her life, her phone offering her discounts on the new Ewan McGregor movie, updating her on the weather in her preferred vacation spots, reminding her to buy birth-control pills or contact-lens solution.

But as for me... enough. I'm not a Luddite - anything but - and I'm not counseling a kneejerk rejection of technology per se. I just want technology to support my real life, not supplant it. In order to ensure this, I need (we all need) to evaluate, to select, and yes, to refuse when it's appropriate.

Because I don't believe for a second that life is about bits flickering in the dark, between constellations of shiny devices embedded and emplaced and orbited and even implanted.

Silly me, I believe life is about dabbing a crusty hunk of bread into a dish of olive oil and raising it to your mouth. Toweling the salty traces of dried sweat from your forehead after an hourlong run. Nibbling on your lover's chewy lower lip. Pulling onto the freeway and really opening up, until the needle twitches at the 100mph line. Rushing home from the bookstore to crack for the first time your favorite author's long-awaited latest. Playing with the foamy head on your pint of Guinness at 1.30 in the morning at some sidewalk café on Avenue A, listening to the air conditioner next door drip drip drip to the concrete.

Not least, I believe life is about doing nothing from time to time.

i can't believe i ate the whole thing

Any technology that supports my ability to participate in these activities and then gets the hell out of the way is OK by me. In theory, a lot of what my coworker is envisioning would actually do this - be the helpful, practical, useful kind of intercession that has the net effect of returning more time to me, to do with what I see fit.

But this is rarely how it happens in practice. There are always batteries to charge, service plans to parse and choose among, help desks to mail and mail again in mounting paroxysms of frustration. The intended time saved is spent managing the technology itself and wondering why the thing isn't working already. This is already true, and if anything, I think the various gadgetmakers are ramping up their efforts to insinuate their toys into any crevice our lives can afford them.

My guess is that this is because the fatigue we feel at the idea of yet another new matte-aluminum, hundred-gigabyte, thousand-hertz wonderprop is less philosophical than it is a matter of a certain technosatiety.

Like many people I know, I'm all set for gadgets for the foreseeable future. Let's see: I have a laptop and a PDA. I've replaced my CD collection and all its attendant clutter with a six-gig mp3 player. I sport a keitai and a USB-compatible digital camera. A state of the art watch. Noise-canceling headphones and a set of lovely transparent speakers. (That each of these devices is called something different, and offers a different interface, when they're all processing the same ones and zeroes, is fodder for a different rant.)

I don't mention any of this to brag, but to make a point: each of these objects is nice, and they all make my life more pleasant in some wise and to some degree. But they're...sufficient. I don't need anything more. I can't see needing to upgrade for quite some time. In a sense, maybe, I've reached a plateau in commodity capitalism's ability to offer me any further inducements to spend.

After years in which the computer's battery never held out long enough, the camera never stored enough high-resolution images, and you couldn't take your Walkman with you on a trail run because the skipping would drive you half-murderous with frustration, this stuff is commensurate to the needs of daily life, more or less. The incremental advantage to be obtained by shelling out still more for the latest iteration of each of these devices eludes me, and for the first time I can remember, the technoporn spilling out of Wired and its ilk does nothing for me.

I doubt I am alone in this.

swimming with the sharks

Thus the fervent, almost frenzied search for new business models, new niches, new moments of intervention; the consumer-products companies need to find something new to sell us. Samsung and Polaroid, Nokia and Palm: like the proverbial shark, they've got to keep pressing forward else they sink soundlessly to the bottom like so many of their cohorts. They must do this in the absence of any real need, in contravention of sense, and in the face of our own subtlest desires.

The deeper issue is that despite all of their (full disclosure: our) efforts to define the delivery of these services as "Experience," any third-grader can tell you that merely being bombarded with information is not the same thing as having an experience. As we all know on some level, information is not the same thing as knowledge, let alone wisdom. To thrust a thousand new gizmos in your face all at once, and tell you that you're being offered Choice and Experience, is nothing short of insulting.

Well, someone has to stand against this. So I'd like to close this rant with a plea to you, in your public role as custodians of information: go ahead, if you must, and rebrand yourselves as "knowledge agents," or whatever formulation succeeds in hoisting your public image out from behind the Marion-the-Librarian cateyes and into the quicksilversexy 21st century. I know your salaries and perceived authority and prospects for advancement (and maybe some small measure of self-esteem) depend on this; far be it from me to dispute the importance or the validity of these things.

But I'm relying on you to help hold the line against the needless onrush of fake novelty, and to remind people where and when you can of the things that really matter.

how to hold the line

How to do this? In large measure, as librarians, do what you've always done: defend the controversial, the banned, the unpopular. Champion those thoughts, and thinkers, that help people develop their critical-thinking skills. Filter. Promulgate the subversive notion that quality of life has little to do with an index of all the gadgets we own, or all the data we can accumulate.

Beyond those job-specific imperatives, be an advocate in the world for those most human of qualities, the things about us that are essential and not contingent. Sensuality. Conviviality. Surprise. Even loss and contradiction and sorrow and bias - all the things, in short, that the next generation (and the next) of peer-to-peer, massively-parallel, high-bandwidth, AirPort-compatible, solid unobtainium information appliances won't be able to provide, at least in the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, in the world it's a gently breezy, sunny September Saturday here in Tokyo: a rarity indeed, in this congested, polluted, overworked, often unpleasant city. I'm going to shut down my PowerBook and go for a bike ride, or maybe a stroll in the park a few blocks away. There's a girl I like to flirt with in the record store I frequent over in Aoyama; perhaps I'll pay her a visit and thumb through the new acid-jazz and ambient arrivals to see if anything particularly strikes my fancy. And - most enticingly of all - I'm entertaining the idea of a lazy afternoon nap out on my deck. You tell me where the "touch point" is in any of that.

Note: I wrote all this in early September 2001, before history cracked in two. I didn't write a word for ten days after the attacks, unwilling to face down that horror with symbols that would never be able to contain it; neither did I read anything I had written previously, for fear that it would sound unbearably trivial.

However, on rereading this article now, I find if anything its advice rings truer than ever. Go find the ones you love, do good, be real. Nothing else matters.