Dear Readers,
Each month, you will receive an email from me about the boredom & the horror & the glory. This is the 41st one.
My dad was the first person I ever saw use a handheld electronic device with the intensity we now all bring to our devices. First it was a Gameboy, which he sometimes played on the train on the way to work, then, years later, a Blackberry. When I stood at a podium reading my poetry in a fancy room at Michigan, I saw him in the front row peering down at it.
The word “device” always makes me think of the first sentence of Citizen, Claudia Rankine’s 2014 poem/memoir about American racism:
When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.
This is such a classic piece of contemporary American prose poetry; its assonance and alliteration (tired/devices, alone/let/yourself/linger) and that spondee!–pást/stácked, stress stress–make it stick in my mind as strongly as any neatly metered and rhymed line. Nick Laird in the New York Review of Books and Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker both wrote about this sentence in their reviews of Citizen when it came out. Chaisson also quotes the sentences that follow that first sentence: “Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Sometimes the moon is missing…” He writes, “This is pre-everything, the deepest pocket of childhood, where the clouds, moons, and houses keep us company. When we reconstruct memories as metaphors, we fill in all the meaning later assigned to them in life by suffering.” In Citizen the “you”-narrator’s suffering means going back to find race and racism in the roots of the most foundational moments in her life, finding that it was there all along. Like she’s never actually alone, the devices are never really turned off, because racism is a device, too—one that was and is always there, pulling the comfy pillows out from under the past.
Laird has a cool way of looking at the sentence, too. “The reader is forewarned: what follows will explore what happens when the ‘devices’ are switched off, not just the smart phone or the iPad, but techniques of evasion and compromise that let the poet exist in the present. There’s also the suggestion that the repudiated ‘devices’ are poetic, rhetorical tricks that ornament or soften.” Rather than ornamentation or softness, Rankine offers hardness, like that spondee. Like there’s this past that is so present it can be stacked among your pillows, but it can only be called forth when you trick yourself away from your devices, prosodic or electronic.
I remember the first time I heard of a Blackberry. Someone, maybe my mom or a friend at college, was talking about them. I remember slowly understanding that they didn’t mean the fruit. I asked what they were talking about. “Didn’t you hear about that? Al Gore used one all the time on the campaign trail?” I pretended I knew.
My earliest experiences with what we came to call devices never gave me any feeling about the future. I never wondered if we were careening toward a world where the Internet was embedded in our lives through devices. In those early years of devices, let’s say the decade beginning with Y2K, I don’t recall glancing at that kind of feeling, ever. I thought of the Internet as one among many ways to try to get the things I desperately desired, desired with the greed, hunger, energy available only to kids and very immature adults. I desired Ani Difranco songs, so I used Napster to download them on my desktop computer during the night while I slept in the room I subletted from a girl who was spending the semester abroad. I desired to talk to boys (I’m not being coy, that’s really what I desired) so I employed whatever technological, social, and sexual tools I could to get what I wanted–AOL instant messenger, tube tops, the telnet server’s “finger” command (which told you whether they were currently checking their email), landlines, hanging around outside classrooms and dorms at times they were likely to emerge.
Rankine’s use of the word “device” is so brilliant not only because it has both poetic and technological meanings, but because it’s vague. I was looking the other day at a poem that I used to love, “I Google Myself,” by Mel Nichols, and I saw that time has stripped it of its archness; the lines “Get down on your knees & / Friend me and Poke me” don’t mean much anymore, because Facebook long ago did away with pokes. And soon Google as we know it now will be gone. What made Nichols’ poem seem so cool and ironic and exciting in 2009 is why it falls flat today: it was reveling in its ephemerality. But Rankine wants to speak to the ages in Citizen, so “devices,” not “iPhone.”
It’s hard to write about these things. It feels like a change we’re in the middle of, a way we’re trying to learn how to live. But isn’t that always what we’re doing? I read two articles about data loss recently, one in The Atlantic by Thomas Chatterton Williams and one by Kashmir Hill, a New York Times journalist who writes about data and privacy. The best part of Williams’ piece is its headline and subhead: “Whoops, I Deleted My Life: A sense of panic set in when I realized I’d erased the entirety of my inbox.” I love this because it’s funny: the first part is overstated and the second part is understated, like reeling as it attempts to find a way to talk about the loss. I wish people wrote more about these personal relationships we have with technological products. But Williams’ writing in the piece is so pedestrian:
The jubilant record of my courtship and marriage; the heartbreaking arguments and hard-won reconciliations; the polyphonic story of my bachelor party and those of my groomsmen; the joy of my children’s birth, with photos appended—it all crowded up with records of travel, receipts, spam, meaningless banter, many thousands of redundant messages notifying me of Twitter and Facebook notifications. This was my inbox: as unique as a snowflake, some two decades in the making and amounting to 90,000 messages—and it is gone now.
“as unique as a snowflake”? The strangeness of us each having these life-records administered by Google deserves a fresher metaphor than that. I have absolutely no idea what in the universe it’s like, but not a snowflake. And the words he attaches to his marriage (jubilant, heartbreaking) and children’s birth[s] (joy) are obvious, received. This writing about email is as boring as email!1 But I feel like these problems with cliché are not Williams’ fault. Nobody has enough practice reconstructing these types of technological memories as metaphors (to paraphrase Dan Chiasson). As creative writing instructors, we always give students the Joycean advice to seek the universal through the specific, rather than go toward the universal right away. But how do you write specifically about your own gmail inbox, whose whole job is to flatten your private world into, and with, data that looks like everybody else’s?
Hill takes a slightly different approach to personal data loss. This piece is a hybrid of advice, reporting, and memoir; Hill tells us about people whose Google accounts were deleted because of misunderstandings, describing them as “stunned and bereft,” and explains that in her reporting on these cases, she learned the same could happen to her. She downloads as much of her digital life as she can and then interviews data specialists and digital archivists who advise her about how to safely store it.
The weird, and to me, stunning, thing about this article is the pictures it includes as evidence of the “extra” stuff we accumulate when we can store so much data so cheaply. I’ve never seen pictures like this in a newspaper. Hill doesn’t come down one way or the other on whether they are “worth” keeping, but their presence alongside the article implies that they represent digital excess. The photo below, she says, is one of almost 100 she took “one November night 15 years ago, out with my family at a Tampa Bay Lightning game.” She doesn’t say anything about the image itself, but she says looking at the collection of them “transported me back to a tremendously fun evening that I had all but forgotten. Yet I wondered how there could be so many photos from just one night. How do I decide which to keep and which to get rid of?”
I love the dad’s red eyes and yellow hair, and the sister’s gorgeous hand, how her ring finger slides against her ear, the shiny, squeaky-looking bags of chips. It’s really beautiful! I’ve thought a lot about this photo since I first read the article. It feels kind of inappropriate to put this photo in my newsletter, like I’m taking something too intimate. But that’s why it moves me. It’s so obviously from someone else’s real life. Since I first read the article, I’ve returned to it many times to look at the photo. I looked through my phone to see if I had any images like this, but I couldn’t find any. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. You can just really see the life being lived in it. It gives me an almost Wolfgang Tillmans feeling. His photographs are so beautiful you almost can’t look at them, but they’re also often completely ordinary; they edge up to the line of being stupid, without ever crossing it. “I keep trying to catch him not knowing what he’s doing. No dice yet,” Peter Schjeldahl writes of Tillmans (in his very last art review). Like he will literally take a picture of a rainbow or a cute baby!
I guess it’s so hard to look at Tillmans’ beautiful photographs because they’re about being young.
That’s what Hill and Williams are writing about, but they don’t say it: not data loss, youth loss. Both these writers are exactly my age. We all were born in 1981 and graduated college in 2003, I checked online. We all graduated from “Ivy Plus” institutions, meaning Facebook came to us in 2004, the year after it hit the Ivies, and Gmail, as Williams, writes came to us via “invitations” from friends (like Spotify did a few years later). So our youth and that last decade before the Internet became a part of every minute are one and the same.
In that decade of being young with a dash of the Internet on the side, the things I wanted to know about–Liz Phair, what a normal thing to make yourself for lunch was, Sassy, Nan Goldin, contemporary poetry, how to know if a boy likes you, what people were supposed to do if they had two hours to themselves, how to get your own radio show, whether it was normal to read a book and have no idea what happened in it or what it was about, what it’s like to work at a magazine, whether Flannery O’Connor was a woman or man–I needed to ask someone about or try to figure out on my own by looking at books and newspapers and pamphlets pinned to grocery store bulletin boards.
The year after my dad died, the year after that Y2K decade ended, I accidentally deleted a voicemail he had once left me, a voicemail that I had carefully kept on my flip phone for years. I felt a sinking feeling, awareness of a vast emptiness bigger than anything I’d ever known. I needed to get that voicemail back. Going through life without that voicemail was not an option; I didn’t even let the thought enter my mind. I spent an afternoon learning about data retrieval services and I decided to buy some software that restored lost voicemails. It cost $100, but I had been willing to pay any price. I downloaded it and it worked. I listened to the voicemail and a sense of peace flooded my body.
There’s one way of seeing it where wholesale data loss of the kind that Williams and Hill write about isn’t that big a deal, and there’s another way of seeing it where it’s an absolute loss of control over who you are and who you have ever been.
I haven’t listened to my dad’s voicemail since that day I deleted then recovered it. I don’t remember what it’s about. I don’t know where in my personal digital world I would locate it, or if I still have the software and hardware to listen to it, or even if I still have it at all. There’s one way of looking at it where I never had it.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Though “the polyphonic story of my bachelor party” is funny; but what does he mean by “those of my groomsmen”? Aren’t they the ones providing the polyphony? Or does he mean his groomsmen’s own bachelor parties? The polyphonic stories of each of his groomsmen’s own bachelor parties?
Seems like data loss is also a fear of death. The belief that if our life is documented and recorded, and that record is kept, then somehow it is more meaningful. Historical figures of the past have their statues and inscriptions, we have digital files on devices as our self-monuments. There may also be a status and a record of conspicuous consumption aspect to it. Being able to show people (including yourself) the things you've done.
Thank you so much for this. I was born in '85 and I can feel the creep of having more life behind me than in front. Had a childhood friend pass recently and realized I had no photos of us together from the last decade. I feel that having many photos helps make my memories more alive. A memory in my head can disappear like a fart in the wind. But a photo lasts a lifetime, right?