Burn the Kindle

Amazon calls their successful e-reader the Kindle. Indeed, it is the kindling in an electronic fire that is destroying our books, bookstores, and libraries. Their newest gadget, released yesterday, is the Kindle Fire.


Fireman Bezos

I'd love to see a real Kindle fire, piles and piles of Kindles set ablaze. Would anything be more delicious?

But, you say, it's the words that matter, not the physical object that carries them. Sure, the words are on those screens now, but how much of a leap will it be to just erase them? Amazon has already done it more than once. When they recalled 1984 (of all titles) in 2009, they simply sucked it back out of the devices like magic.

When it's time to take all the books away, there will be no need for lighter fluid and blowtorches. Big Brother will just press a button.



When it's time to take all the books away, people will give them up willingly. They already are.

Listen to the book-hating venom in the voices of people in fetishistic love with their Kindles and Apples. You can hear it everywhere. Destroy the dusty old tomes! Onward with the gleaming future! Even the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors among us have sucked down that toxic Kool-Aid with a smile.

The analgesic tyranny of the screen has all of us drugged and brainwashed to some extent. This is what Ray Bradbury was writing about in Fahrenheit 451. "I wasn't worried about freedom," he said. "I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV... Fahrenheit's not about censorship, it's about...the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids."



In the late 1950s, Bradbury wrote about a prophetic scene:

"In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction."

In the novel, he wrote about the first iPod, a device for conveying propaganda and keeping people subdued:

"His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of the tomb, her eyes fixed in the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty."



But most people don't worry about the devices and the screens and all the strange things they're doing to us, whether it's watering down our brains or stealing our privacy, turning us into zombies, eager to hand over our humanity.

Your Kindle is watching you. It keeps track of the books you read, how often you read them, how quickly you turn the pages, even the personal notes you make in the margins. And the new Kindle Fire is even better at it. It can track, bundle, and sell you in seconds. Said Representative Edward Markey last month, “Consumers may buy the new Kindle Fire to read ‘1984,’ but they may not realize that the tablet’s ‘Big Browser’ may be watching their every keystroke.”


Burning comic books in Binghamton, NY

There is a hatred and fear of books inside human beings. Our lust for and allegiance to the Almighty Screen is its latest expression.

It's time to revolt. Burn those Kindles. Say no to Amazon. Stand up for real books. Before it's too late.


World War II poster

Steve Jobs, Ergo Sum

Last week, in preparation for the new iPhone launch, the Apple store in Chelsea removed all of the Steve Jobs memorial Post-It notes from their windows. (People are still walking around the city with Steve Jobs memorial hair, however.) While they were there, the notes gave us a glimpse into the hive mind of the Cult of Apple.



For the record, I am a long-time consumer of Apple products. I am not, however, a member of the Cult. I like my MacBook, but I don't want to meld my mind and body to it. As for Steve Jobs, I never thought much about him--I didn't think about his suicide-plagued sweatshops in China, nor the fact that he never gave a sou of his billions to charity. Plenty of others are speaking out about Jobs' lack of godliness, and that's not what really interests me.

What interests me is what's going on in the heads of people who seem convinced that Steve Jobs was godly to begin with.

So, to the notes.



The notes are an outpouring--"global" said the blue-shirted Genius inside--a global outpouring of grief and gratitude for Steve Jobs and the products he marketed so well.

"Thank you for the touch screen" and "I love my iPhone," they say. "I loved my iPad," says another, oddly in past tense, as if a product could die without its designer. That seems to be a fear people have, that all these shiny objects will vanish into the ether. Says another: "Thank you for changing our lives. May Apple products live on."

Can people separate the man from the product line?

"Thank you for your brain. XXOO," says one. Is Steve Jobs' brain embodied in the products themselves? In a way. Do people feel as if Jobs and the iPhone are one? Some notes would indicate yes. Like this one: "You were my first and I'm staying electronically true to you!"

Has some intimate exchange involving virginity transpired? "Electronically true" conjures an image of robotic love: When your USB cable plugged into my port for the first time, I knew...



Many people feel that Steve Jobs and his products improved their lives and the lives of everyone on the planet. Several notes say "You made my life better" and "You were a benefit to humanity."

What was that benefit? One sums it up: "You made us look and feel cooler." To look and to feel is to be. Isn't it?

How did Jobs do all of this? Apparently, he was God.

Members of non-Apple religions have declared their allegiance via conversion: "I'm a Pakistani who has completely converted to the Mac cause." They write, "Thank you for getting us where we need to go. The iPhone is a Godsend!" We can feel Godlike just by being connected to God via His products.

According to the notes, we would not exist without Jobs.

"We're different because you were," says one. (A similar note at the Soho Apple store says, "I am because you were." Forget about thinking--it's "Steve Jobs, ergo sum.")

More disturbingly, another note attests: "Only you could make the world."



The idealization of Jobs, and concurrent devaluing of the self, goes even further as one note-maker who worships the God of Jobs sees him or herself as NOTHING in comparison.

Is this the crux of the global outpouring of grief? Without Jobs and his products we are nothing. Is this the perverse message at the wormy core of Apple's marketing?

Look at the iPhone, the iPad--there's that "i" that seems to focus on you and me, providing a narcissistic extension of the self, but it is rendered only in lowercase, always smaller than the name of the product proper, less than. "i" am just a small addition to the product, clinging to its greatness.



The notes, in total, sound like a prayer, a sticky yellow prayer on a retail window. If we can sum up their collective message, the prayer might go like this:

"i am attached to You, and thus blessed, but i am less than You, oh God of sleek and shiny things, You who made the world, You who improved the suffering lot of humanity, You with Your incomprehensible, superior brain, You with your halo of goodness, You who made us look and feel like something important even though we were, and continue to be, nothing compared to You. i exist because you exist. For You so loved the world that You gave your one and only product line, that whoever believes in You shall not perish but have eternal iLife."

Amen?



Post Script:

The Jobs memorial at the Soho Apple Store remains up. On a piece of pulp board someone has created a bloody valentine of sorts--"The streets miss you!"--with a deformed, half-blind, zombie-faced human clinging for life to the Apple logo.

Someone else has affixed an "Occupy Wall Street" sticker to the board. Above the sticker, a simple reminder: "SJ = 1%."

Cells at Registers

People talk on their cell phones everywhere. We know this. We bear this unbearable fact daily. But one of the more egregious cell-phone uses occurs at the city's countless cash registers. You've seen them. Those people who approach the counter, plop down their purchases, and say nothing to the cashier, all the while yakking to some invisible someone else while the worker silently rings up their wares.

Money changes hands. No one speaks. The consumer behaves as if they are alone in the universe. It's one of the more dehumanizing everyday experiences we can witness.



Some businesses have begun expressing their weariness of such behavior with little signs displayed on their cash registers.

Think Coffee tries the polite approach, "kindly refrain from talking on your cell phone when ordering."



Soy Luck Cafe takes another tack, trying to flip the script, "If you are on the phone at the counter we will pretend that you don't exist." (As you pretend we don't exist.)

In small, parenthetical type, they add, "It's a beautiful world all around you. Be a part of it."



Awhile back, Ken Belson wrote about sidewalk cellphone use in the Times, "cellphone walkers are less likely to help a stranger in need, for instance, or to exchange pleasantries with passers-by. They are effectively cutting themselves off from the random encounters in public spaces that used to invigorate city living."

In Sherry Turkle's new book Alone Together, she complains "that the sight at a local cafe of people focused on their computers and smartphones as they drink their coffee bothers her: 'These people are not my friends,' she writes, 'yet somehow I miss their presence.'" In the Times review, Kakutani called this "primly sanctimonious...sentimental whining," but it's a profound statement. I know how Turkle feels. We have lost people to these devices.

As we lose humans to technology, we also lose a piece of our humanity.

Wired to the Old

The Wired pop-up store has popped up again this holiday season, this time in the former Tower Records space on 4th and Broadway, that unloved cavern left largely empty for the past several years. It's a notable juxtaposition--three floors of tech fetishism celebrating the future in a place that once sold records and tapes, a place undone by the iTune.

This juxtaposition was present everywhere at the Wired store. The faux-stalgic melding of old and new appeared again and again.



A portable cassette tape player is not as it appears. It's really an MP3 player featuring "a design that mirrors a retro cassette tape player—without the tape!"

You can also get a faux-notebook, "bound with traditional bookbindery techniques" and hollowed out to accommodate your iPhone. Its paper-free wooden casing will make you feel artisanally correct.



For those who miss analog telephones and their superior, intimate sound quality--or for those who just think missing the analog is hip--there's the POP Phone in a rainbow of color. You plug it into your cell phone or computer and yap away. With all the recent findings about cell phones and brain cancer, think we'll ever see these babies on the streets?



If you long for the olden days when you carried a boombox on your shoulder, sharing your music with every passerby, then the Personal Soundtrack Shirt is for you. With a speaker embedded in the fabric, you can blast your digital tunes everywhere you go.



Finally, my personal favorite, the Antique USB Typewriter. They connect to your computer, just like a keyboard, and they're made by a guy named Jack Zylkin, who describes them as "a groundbreaking advancement in the field of obsolescence."



I look at all of these products in part mockingly and also wonderingly, curious to understand what the trend is all about. Are people longing to incorporate the old into the new because the future is coming faster and faster, too fast to tolerate? Is the act of inserting an iPhone into a book a performance of dominance, the New dancing on the corpse of the Old? It likely has different meanings and purposes for different people.

Still, I can imagine in some future, when all the books have been destroyed, when I am forced without a choice to read on some glossy Pad, and every sign of our old lives has been cast away, that I will huddle to these artifacts for solace, pretending in the hollow of a faux-book that not everything is made of plastic and toxic radiation. Pretending that my fellow humans did not, with their wallets, choose to kill off the tangible completely.

Your Brain on the Net

Is your brain spending too much time wired? If you've got $4.95 and about 90 minutes of free time, watch this video from the New Yorker Festival: Your Brain on the Internet.

Panelists Nicholson Baker, Elizabeth Phelps, Jaron Lanier, and Jonah Lehrer have interesting things to say about the importance of daydreaming, the hazards of multitasking, the venom in online anonymity, and the day when only rich people will have good cognition.



Choice quote from Lanier: If Facebook had been around years ago, "You could never have had a Bob Dylan because his high-school page would have dogged him in Greenwich Village and he'd have still been 'the Zimmerman kid,' and it would've been terrible... I don't think you can grow up and invent yourself without a little bit of subterfuge."

Panelist Info:
Nicholson Baker
Elizabeth Phelps
Jaron Lanier
Jonah Lehrer

Book Stigma

I've been trying for some time now to get my head around this new anti-book trend that has led to the popularity of soulless "vooks" like the Kindle and the Nook. Of course, there are many reasons for it, but in an article that scores major points for the coming Idiocracy, the New York Times recently revealed a shocking piece of the puzzle.

Apparently, there is a social stigma attached to reading books alone in public.


Pathetic misanthrope with no friends

This terrible stigma afflicts people not just in illiterate parts of the country and on junior-high cheerleading squads, but all across New York City, a one-time literary capital. What is the stigma? Simply put, if you are caught reading a book in public, you will appear to be: alone, unapproachable, "bookish," unwilling to socialize, and introverted. How awful. But there is hope!

Says a dermatologist on the subject, this dreadful stigma "no longer exists because of the advancement of our current technology. We are in a high-tech era and the sleekness and portability of the iPad erases any negative notions or stigmas associated with reading alone."


Portrait of a stigmatized loser

Dermatologists ought to know. Maybe reading books is also bad for the skin? Perhaps a little Botox for reading wrinkles? Thinking is known to furrow the brow. No, the cure for this stigma does not come from any bacterial neurotoxin (well, maybe it does). The cure is simply: Buy an e-reader, preferably from Apple.

E-readers allow you to be connected to the hive while you pretend to be engrossed in reading. "Given that some e-readers can display books while connecting online, there’s a chance the erstwhile bookworm is already plugged into a conversation somewhere," said a professor of communication and media studies.


Marilyn Monroe: Bravely battling with book stigma

In other words: Reading without digital distraction is social suicide. It will make you unpopular. You will appear intelligent and, therefore, ill-tempered and unfuckable.

Always be connected and distracted, so you appear to be more socially attuned, even though, as anyone who walks the streets of New York knows: People on smartphones, iPads, and the like pay no attention whatsoever to other human beings, rapidly moving vehicles, or open manhole covers. They are in a sociopathic trance, and that is somehow preferable to reading a book?


Unlike lame books, the iPad will get you laid

What the dermatologist and the media professor, and other iPad lovers in the Times article, fail to understand, it seems, is that book lovers are very connected, especially in the presence of other book lovers. When reading a book, we are also connected to our deeper selves, and to the "bigger picture," to universal ways of being, to--dare I say it?--the human condition.

In the New Autistic World Order, the only thing we're permitted to connect with is the anti-human "Borg" system of electronic media. Failure to do so will lead to ostracism from the hive-mind.

But would that really be so bad?

Put us all on an island without Kindles, Nooks, iPads, iPhones, and Blackberries, with lots of bookstores and avid readers, and we'll do just fine. Oh, wait, wasn't that Manhattan not long ago?

• Read the whole Times story here
• On the Future of Books
• The loser bookworm's post-apocalyptic dream
  

Years ago, they put images of total losers on college buildings--
now only ugly gargoyles who can't get laid read books
(photo: Ephemeral NY)

Autistic Age

I came upon the following article in issue #58 of Philosophy Now. Published in 2006, it shows us how the age of the Yunnie is really becoming the age of the Autist, who rules our current, post-postmodern world, called here "pseudo-modernism."

I've excerpted a few key passages below, but the whole article is worth reading as it is relevant to issues on our minds today--like the effect of screen reading on our brains, the demise of books, the rise of plagiarism, and the end of empathy.



from "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond," by Alan Kirby:

"In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980.

Those born later might see their peers as free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, dynamic, empowered, independent, their voices unique, raised and heard: postmodernism and everything before it will by contrast seem elitist, dull, a distant and droning monologue which oppresses and occludes them.

Those born before 1980 may see, not the people, but contemporary texts which are alternately violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless and brainless (see the drivel found, say, on some Wikipedia pages, or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came before pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and authenticity."


Borg cupcakes

"The world has narrowed intellectually, not broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw the eclipse of Grand Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity--monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold."



"This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity.

In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism."



"You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded."

© Dr Alan Kirby 2006