Determining how people see and use information online while collecting massive amounts of data about those people are traits we associate with totalitarian governments like China, and their sprawling internet control regimes. But amidst this week’s clamor of internet rights campaigners and web pundits, are we forgetting that Google basically does the same thing?
Google’s fingersnap in China’s face this week over Internet censorship and espionage has won praise from all corners of the internet. “Good for Google,” proclaimed the Washington Post. The Center for Democracy and Technology said, “No company should be forced to operate under government threat to its core values or to the rights and safety of its users.”
But tear away the plaudits and the controversy and the inevitable fears and remember the business interests at stake in this dust up, up pops an underlying irony: both Google and China are after the same thing, just for different reasons. On one side is a government attempting to determine what people see and do on the internet, and collecting their data while they’re at it. On the other side is a massive corporation attempting to do that in the service of advertising.
“There’s an interesting dynamic between Google and China,” Jaron Lanier, the Internet philosopher and author of the new book You Are Not a Gadget, said last night after a talk at the 92nd Street Y. “The Chinese Communist Party would like to be the central place where everybody has to move through to move communication. The reason the Communist Party wants to do that is both for power purposes but also to control what is said. They want to control reality traditionally. Obviously this is a bad program and we’d like them not to succeed in that.
“But on the other hand… Google also wants to be the single node through which everybody has to connect. Their purpose is to sell advertising. But in a sense the style of power they want does have some overlap with what the Chinese want. And so they’re in a unique position of wanting to compete in a somewhat similar way.”
Lanier, whose “new book issues a loud groan about Web 2.0, calls out Google and Facebook as “lords of the clouds,” landlords whose apparent generosity depends on the spread of free user-made content in the service of advertising, to the point where ads and content become one and the same, and trading quality of content for quantity of clicks.
“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
He says the trend of sharing free content pushed by companies like Google can lead us into a kind of “digital Maoism.”
“In the long term, the Google approach just doesn’t work,” he said. “If you’re trying to run a whole civilization for the sake of advertising, and you’re pulling the means of income away from the intellectuals of that civilization, you don’t have something that’s sustainable.”
Into the Googleplex
Google’s commitment to user privacy has been a subject of controversy before, even if this time Google appears to be in the right. But beyond the accusations against China, one argument is asking Google to take another good look in the mirror.
If the company didn’t maintain such a giant storehouse of user data, this hack attack would be hardly as worrisome. Someare speculating, that Google’s certainty about the Chinese threat and its righteous about-face on censorship may be a melodramatic smokescreen for something they’re not telling us: most seriously, that Google may have engineered its servers to help Beijing keep special tabs on Chinese internet use.
In any case, as Ed Morozov noted, the best advice for the future may have come from Eric Schmidt, Google’s own CEO, in an interview with CNBC last month: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Crowd Control — Or Cloud Control? In the grand scheme and on the super web, what’s worse? The People’s Republic of China going after rights activists and freedom-seekers using a supreme army of hackers firing from the ramparts of the Great Firewall, against the protestations and rancor of the world? Or the World’s Greatest Company’s cloud control, tracking nearly everything we make and do for the sake of selling ads, at the risk of all kinds of unknown violations of our privacy, while everyone mostly looks the other way, absorbed as we are by the newest youtube meme?
I used to live in China, and I expected that at least some of my online communications would be subject to surveillance. But it doesn’t matter where in the world I live now. I live in the Google cloud. If China’s hackers don’t get to my data (and they still can), it’s all there, in Google’s hands.
Whether activists’ emails are getting hacked or our identities and behavior are being tracked, Google still comes out looking like the saintiest and smartest of companies, living up to its widely celebrated code of “Don’t be Evil.”
So far, Google seems to be largely living up to that motto. But the self command not to be evil also hints at the potential to be the exact opposite. In a way, almost sounds like the corporate version of “Serve the People.” That’s the Communist Party’s most famous motto, emblazoned next to Mao’s portrait, overlooking China’s great physical precursor to the web, the dubious public commons of Tiananmen Square.
Now I was only down the hall from the room. But before we call China or anyone the bad guy of the Copenhagen summit, I think we need to take a good look in the mirror.
If China did indeed force the final accord in Copenhagen in its favor, that may point to a failure of the international climate treaty-making process. But more importantly, even amidst a possible redrawing of the climate relations map, China’s role at Copenhagen reminds us of the key issue dividing the developing and developed world: while it hurtles towards a clean tech economy, China, like other high-emitting developing nations, is laser-focused on its “right to develop.” And it expects the developed world to do much more to prevent climate change. Rightly so.
China’s serious
For its part, China is serious about fighting climate change, in part because it’s going to make lots of money off clean technology, in part because it’s concerned about energy independence and in part because it’s going to be hurt by climate change as much as any country. Its pledge to cut energy intensity from 2005 levels by 40 percent by 2020 is evidence of that commitment.
In his address to the summit, Wen Jiabao struck some of the most promising notes possible, describing China’s own actions as a matter of responsibility, and as unconditional and ambitious: “This is a voluntary action China has taken in the light of its national circumstances. We have not attached any condition to the target, nor have we linked it to the target of any other country. We will honor our word with real action. Whatever outcome this conference may produce, we will be fully committed to achieving and even exceeding the target.”
Economic growth first doesn’t preclude clean growth
But Beijing’s main focus remains its continued economic development. It sees that growth as crucial for the health of the people and also the Party, which knows that economic slowdown could imperil it. How will global warming shape that expansion? Notwithstanding its heavy reliance on coal, China’s economy is already growing cleaner, and not only for economic and strategic reasons (China is arguably able to harness its rapidly growing economy and government to go green faster than the US). Primarily the effects of air and water pollution, not of climate change, are driving citizens to the kind of anger and protest that could endanger the Party’s rule. (If we’re looking to blame the Chinese government for bad, unsustainable behavior, how about its restrictions on freedom of speech and information, for starters?)
China’s got other interests on the table too: protecting its economy from the challenges of rapid climate change adaptation, staying competitive in energy technology, demanding that the world’s biggest historical emitters make their own commitments first, and maintaining its “national sovereignty.”
Transparency: check
I’ll address the last concern first, as its a controversial but relatively insignificant one in this context. National sovereignty was always a touchy subject for the Middle Kingdom, given its delicate history with the West and its dubious statistics. For much of the summit it created the biggest sticking point: would China ever allow the world to independently verify its emissions reductions, thereby ensuring that the rest of the world’s carbon cuts are not for nothing?
That’s not much of a sticking point anymore, and it may have only been a phantom problem. With the Copenhagen Accord, Beijing backed off its public stance against transparency and permitted “international consultation and analysis.” Few doubted this would happen; Beijing and Washington had already laid the groundwork for this kind of transparency during during Obama’s Beijing visit in November. China’s Copenhagen concession — and its final, crucial agreement to include its carbon cuts in the appendix to the Accord — gave the summit some luster of success.
But real success lies ahead. Will Beijing’s concession be enough to convince the Senate to pass climate legislation? If it is — and that’s still a big if, especially after the fragile health care win — Obama’s last-minute deal-brokering won’t have been in vain, and China will deserve some credit for reassuring the rest of the world that it’s serious.
China Sabotaged Copenhagen? Really? Wen?
Given China’s remaining concerns — protecting economic growth, adapting to climate change, staying competitive in energy technology, and demanding equitable cuts — it’s not hard to see why China, according to reports, blocked targets for its own emissions, a 50 percent reduction by 2050.
But why did China also block a target proposed by Angela Merkel for developed nations to trim emissions by 80 percent by 2050? Perhaps China wants to ensure it will get to be one of those developed nations by then. Perhaps more relevant, as Wang Yi, an expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, told Reuters, such goals are empty unless rich countries vow to make steeper cuts in emissions and agree on how to parcel out the remaining share of the global emissions “budget.”
“The coming year of negotiations will be very demanding and nothing will be easy to solve,” he said. “We need to be clear about how the 50 percent would be shared out, otherwise it’s an empty slogan, and now we need actions, not posturing.”
The refusal of these more ambitious cuts, as Martin Khor writes in the Guardian, was reasonable. “Together, they imply that developing countries would have to cut their emissions overall by about 20% in absolute terms and at least 60% in per capita terms. By 2050, developed countries with high per capita emissions – such as the US – would be allowed to have two to five times higher per capita emission levels than developing countries.” That would also, he notes, “have locked in a most unfair sharing of the remaining global carbon budget as it would have allowed the developed countries to get off free from their historical responsibility and their carbon debt. They would have been allocated the rights to a large amount of “carbon space”, historically and in the future, without being given the obligation and responsibility to undertake adequate emission cuts nor to make adequate financial and technology transfers to developing countries.”
As for the various controversies and tensions that arose during last minute back room — and perhaps behind-the-back — negotiations at Copenhagen, which played out, as Joe Romm notes, like a Shakespearean Comedy of Errors style “wrong door” escapade, I don’t think discussing that or casting blame is productive.
Ultimately, it was President Obama who seemed to keep talks alive. “I don’t want to mess around with this anymore, I want to just talk with Premier Wen,” he reportedly told a member of his staff as talks seemed to be devolving into an Upstairs-Downstairs farce (see also the President’s own account, from an interview with News Hour, at Dot Earth). Obama’s relationships with world leaders and his determination to get them to agree to something not only prevented back-tracking but kept intact some measure of good will. We need as much of that as possible as we continue trying to forge a climate agreement.
Climate fairness
But Obama’s success only highlights the U.S.’s failure in general, which will become the bigger sticking point in climate talks: when will the U.S. (along with other Western nations) step up its own climate change game? Even now, 20 percent of the world’s population living in industrialized countries contributes 70-80 percent of all the GHG emissions that are leading to climate change. In October President Obama acknowledged that given their historical impact, developed nations should shoulder more responsibility than poorer ones, providing them with green financing and technology transfer — key pieces in the puzzle before countries like China can feel comfortable with serious cuts.
We have reached a crossroads, and rich countries get to choose the route we all take.One route leads us out of today’s economic and climate crises and towards a low carbon future. The other spells disaster for hundreds of millions of people across the globe.
So what did Obama bring to Copenhagen? He offered cuts of 3-4% from 1990 levels (part of an average 11-19% overall reduction by other developed nations) by 2020. In fact, entering Copenhagen, no country seemed prepared to do anything near what scientists say is adequate to help combat climate change (cuts of 40% by 2020).
That makes the question of whether China held Copenhagen hostage moot. There was little to hold hostage, and no ransom to be won.
Missing: technology transfer
Okay, maybe there was a ransom, at least a monetary one. Thanks to a last-minute pledge by the US, the Copenhagen Accord lays out the prospect of a $100 billion fund for developing countries. Even if that’s not enough money, as some have contended, and even if the details on financing remain elusive, the fund is a sign of progress, and is commensurate with the responsibilities of developed nations.
But the accord only pays vague lip service to the related component of technology transfer, an element in which China has expressed much more interest. Though it wants the legal right to climate financing, Beijing has been careful not to seem greedy or needy. Its real priority is advancing its technology and learning capabilities through international exchange. That needn’t necessarily be an invitation to piracy, as many in the West worry. But assuaging the fears of Western politicians and business leaders and striking the right balance between sharing and competition will be crucial if the West is to convince China and other high-emitting developing countries that they can take on more serious carbon cuts.
As Wang Ke, a climate change policy expert at Renmin University in Beijing, told Reuters, “China and other developing countries will feel the negotiations to come will be equally tough as we get into the details … The funding commitments from the developed countries are still vague, and technology transfer issues were barely mentioned (in the Copenhagen accord).”
Still, he said, “The agreement reached was better than total collapse.”
Copenhagen’s lessons (for now): too much “messing around”
Ultimately, I left Copenhagen without bitterness or blame, but a head-numbing sense of confusion and conundrum. From the pile of debris left behind, I took these lessons:
- The world treated COP15 like a trade treaty, not a peace treaty. Every country, not just China and the U.S. came to the conference to debate on terms and needs specific to their own country, even though the effects of global warming are distributed globally. That points not neccessarily to a problem with the process — after all, this is the United Nations, and a meeting of every nation — but an economic and philosophical challenge. As the journal Nature put it, “anyone who uses energy from fossil fuels at a price that does not account for climate-related costs of greenhouse-gas emissions is also ‘winning’ at someone else’s expense. Winners and losers may be the same people, but usually they are not.” How do we legislate among them — or rather, how will they legislate among themselves?
This may also be a question of how much faith we invest in the UNFCCC process. We need to start investing that faith, and the effort that comes with it, into pushing domestic policies that lay the groundwork for a treaty next time that can work well with existing policies and needs while exploring other multilateral avenues for the future. If the world needs the biggest emitters, not every country, to sign onto cuts to launch a global low-carbon economy, perhaps much of the work on a climate treaty should be left up to talks at the G20 or the Major Economies Forum, with the UNFCCC playing a follow-up role.
- However powerful China may now be — or however powerful people wish to perceive it –the most powerful actor on the climate stage is the United States, led by President Obama. His relations with world leaders and the trust he has built up in the climate arena, notwithstanding the limited outcome of Copenhagen, will continue to prove valuable in future talks. But his role in the future will be determined in no small part by the success of climate legislation in the U.S. If he can succeed at convincing the United States that a low-carbon economy is a sustainable economy in every sense of the word, he will be able to make the U.S. a leader at climate talks and assure an American economic advantage.
- The fragile sense of trust exposed in the aftermath of Copenhagen cuts both ways. For a good-faith deal to come about, the West and China specifically both need to work on improving not just their relationship, but more fundamentally, how they perceive the other. The summit has illustrated China’s ascendance to world power, even as it reinforces the country’s role as leader of the developing world. We owe it to China to keep the pressure on, as they are the world’s largest polluter, and maintain big expectations commensurate with their strength. But we also need to keep reality in mind, recognizing not only the country’s limitations but its suspicions that the developed world wants to limit China’s growth.
Similarly, China’s leaders need to recognize that Western leaders are not just spouting rhetoric when it comes to climate action, but have partly acknowledged their obligations, and see the developed world’s participation, however limited it may need to be, as a delicate prerequisite to their own efforts.
- The leaders of the developing world have a lot to do. The developed world has to do more. If the US and rest of the developed world can cap emissions and innovate to meet new standards, they will not only be addressing their historical responsibilities and kick-starting a global low-carbon economy. They could well be assuring their own economic futures. New standards would lead to technologies they could sell to rapidly developing countries like China, which will need such solutions as their own standards increase.
To paraphrase President Obama, we need American and developed world lawmakers to stop messing around with this, and do something.
In any case, blaming China now for destroying the world won’t help future negotiations, and it certainly won’t change the world’s general inaction. It won’t help the world get on track to low-carbon economies, nor will it dissuade China from its mission to lead the world in clean development.
But passing around blame could distract us from the crux of the climate treaty issue. Forget how much we can trust the climate efforts of China and the rest of the developing world. How much can it trust ours?
Li’s “meet and split” idea has proved so attractive because it is an “all fun, no obligation” arrangement.
Thousands of young Chinese have joined online shan wan forums.
Shan wan groups are usually made up of two to six people, called shan you. They go Dutch on their outings, which pack in activities like sightseeing, eating, singing karaoke and shopping. The ‘players’ do not need to reveal their real names if they choose not to. And since they are meeting each other in a third city, their privacy is protected.
Some say they find the prospect of spending a day with strangers exciting — liberating even, because they can let their hair down.
I had a premonition of meeting Kong Shao Han – “Alex” – or someone like him an hour before. It was one of those unaccounted for moments at the start of a short journey to a new city, where you know no one. My first stop on my evening walk was the DVD shop – part of my lightning Nanjing history lesson would be the film about the massacre here by the Japanese, Nanjing Nanjing, and the woman at the shop convinced me to get the Founding of the Republic too. And it came to me as I left: the time I had spent at the stupid DVD shop had determined the rest of my night, and it seemed more important than any other thing that had led me there – the timing of leaving my room, or the time it took at the front desk to sort out my payment and visa. Because the DVD shop was not expected, and it was really a distraction from the city I was trying to see. But the exact number of minutes I spent there would at a certain moment put me in a spot of significance. Similarly, if I had left at another point, if I had never gone into the DVD shop, if I weren’t even in Nanjing, all of those variations would also have led to an intersection of coincidences that would change my life – if not soon, later. I was sure of that if I thought about it, but I couldn’t. It was too mind boggling to have to consider – much less choose between – a menu of “fated” occurracnes. I believe in fate only to the extent that I believe in coincidences and belief – the belief that we don’t control everything we think we do, the recognition that there are two many other things out there to worry about; fate ultimately tells us to just, well, forget it. Fate. Forget what was and what you think will be and let what will happen happen.
(Forgetting is one of those things this country has to be pretty good at, I realize, thanks to all the cranes and chai and the nauseating spin forward.)
Shao Han was a revelation. A guy my age working for Philips walking past me and asking something – I forget what, but nothing prying or annoying or persistent. He was reading Memoirs of a Geisha and for the third time. He was wiry, even frail, even petite, and wore a t-shirt with an image of a cute sheep on it, with the words “little sheep” emblazoned on it in a strange orientation, the kind of shirt that girls and I also might wear. He loved his mother but spoke little of his father, who was a professor of literature and yes, a descendent of the original Kong (the great philosopher). He too had studied literature but had reconciled himself, in the way many Chinese people do, to a career as a business person, vaguely speaking. A consultant, translator, writer, I’m not precisely sure what he did for the company but it involved reaching out to retailers in China, connecting with them. Clearly he was a good connector – the way he insinuated himself into my walk was guileless and unthreatening – but the notion that someone as irrepressibly curious and sympathetic and thoughtful has he could be doiong some kind of marketing work seemed like a smal tragedy. He might not have been here at all, he said, if not for his college teacher from Australia, who encouraged him out of his shell, told him he had every right to speak up in spite of a system – passed down from his great ancestor – that preached docile adherance to tradition, to the instruction of teachers, to a self-effacing academics of what mostly amounted to brain-numbing note-takings.
For instance, he proudly recounted the time, after a meeting with his boss and a rude colleague from South Korea, how he told the South Korean man that he had single-handedly ruined Alex’s impression of the county and its people. Later his boss asked him to next time maybe not be so abrasive.
I thought maybe he was talking about a hypothetical situation, but he confirmed that, no, it happened.
Another time, when he was near the end of high school, a teacher spotted him reading a kind of samizdat novel by a young underground writer, Han Han. The novel was titled “The Three Doors,” which referred to school, parents and the government. He was eventually reprimanded by the school’s principal, a supposedly enlightened woman who called Alex’s father in for a meeting. How dare you let him read something like this, this unhealthy garbage, she scolded the father, who may have smirked but eventually sat there taking it, staring forward, this professor of literature being lectured on the evils of a book by this starchy character type of Chinese education.
The joke of course was that Han Han – who is now a famous blogger and, in the vein of a number of wealthy young people (albeit often sons of wealthy people), is now a race car driver – was precisely right, and in classic China style, the principal’s excoriation was only proving it.
We talked about a lot, and with no boundaries — about his disgust with Japanese people (he was from Qingdao and he seemed to have no strong connection to Nanjing, but still), about his hero Chen Lulu (“the Chinese Oprah”) and his fatigue with CCTV, about his interest in comics and especially in the Twilight series, about how he had been let down by a system in which very basic attempts to learn and ask questions were met with denial, or denials of service, Page not founds.
Once when a site he was trying to use to study English was blocked by the Great Firewall, he got so mad that he picked up the phone and called the local police station to ask why. How old are you, the police officer asked him. You don’t understand. This is for your own good, and for the strength and health of the motherland.
The stare in his eyes and the sound in his voice still had echoed a significant defeat.
Do you have a positive outlook, he asked me. It seemed that I was supposed to ask him that question. Do you believe in fate, he said. I hesitated, but then said no. I asked him.
He had a girlfriend, he said, when he was in college. His only girlfriend. They met on the internet and grew their friendship there, true wang you, internet friends (love that word). When she suggested she leave Shijiazhuang, her hometown near Beijing, to come visit him in Qingdao, where he was studying at the Ocean University. That made him nervous, so he suggested he come visit her. She let him know the next time her parents would be away. But that too made him nervous — was it right for a boy and a girl to be alone in her house for a weekend? He really wasn’t sure. But he went, and things developed. They continued talking online, but fell distant. He tried to rebuild their connection, but she only grew more despondent. Then, near graduation, he learned that she had gotten married. The groom was the son of a government official, who drove a nice car. Shao was heartbroken, depressed.
To Shao’s surprise, she got back in touch with him a year later. The marriage was terrible, and she needed someone to talk to. Their friendship was slowly being repaired. And then one day, he received a note in the mail. It was from the girl’s mother, and it said simply,
Forget it
Shao repeated that sadly, almost like an entreaty.
He seemed to take those words as a reminder of how little control he had over his world. But it was equally a symbol to him of the only way he and so many other bright people in China could survive: to accept the limit of the individual’s domain, and to do what he could to make himself and hopefully others happy.
He was somewhat happy, he said. The girl was getting happier too, he reported. She had recently been divorced.
I had to go and do write some stupid article. We said goodbye, we said we’d see each other the next day. He wanted to cook me lunch, go shopping for vegetables at his local market. The next day I was meant to leave, and had no time. I was admittedly also a bit uncomfortable about meeting again; I enjoyed our talk so much but worried that the next time would be different. But I would have gone had I had more time.
The next day I thought of him when I went to the Nanjing massacre memorial museum. It is really a breathtaking place. Probably the finest historical monument I’ve seen in China (that’s not saying much, but it’s really great), to one of the country’s worst tragedies (and there are many many of them). I only got a few photographs before a security guard told me photographs are not allowed. Could it be because the directors are worried visitors will depend upon flash memories rather than their real memories? The message of the museum is captured in its domain name
I emailed Alex but I didn’t hear back surprisingly. Still haven’t. I wonder if he was heartbroken. I also wonder if, just as I imagined I would meet Alex, the way I dreamt I was fated to meet him, if maybe he wasn’t just my imagination.
Awesome video by Dan Chung (read the making-of)
My pal Sasha is working on the NYRB blog, which just launched with a piece by Perry Link that gives a concise historical exploration of the imagery China marshaled for the big National Day parade.
In the 1980s, at the outset of “the second thirty years,” Chinese intellectuals began to worry about a “thought vacuum” after the death of socialist ideology. What could people believe in? What, in particular, could they use as shared public values to hold a civil society together? And how could there be a societal discussion of these questions, given that the Party controls the media and also crushes any political or religious group that it does not control? With no answers to these questions, bald materialism seemed to be filling the void. The poverty and asceticism of the Mao years had created a psychological rebound into frenetic materialism.
The other Party-approved public value of the second thirty years has been nationalism, which the celebrations of the 60th anniversary were obviously designed to magnify. The Party uses nationalism to distract attention from domestic problems (corruption, injustice, pollution, etc.) and to position itself as a hero and spokesperson for all the Chinese people. Beneath these maneuvers, a well of cultural pride and a sense of aggrievement about the last two centuries of world history do lie deep within the modern Chinese psyche.
Worth a read, even if you have to climb over the Great Firewall (I think the site has already been blocked in China, if not because of the author because it’s got “blog” in its URL). For a largely unhistorical, unconcise exploration that might echo some of what Link has written, there’s this essay sort of thing I wrote. It was also posted at The China Beat.
My second day back in Beijing, and I was already under house arrest.
It was a sensitive time — the day before China’s 60th birthday — and I found myself stuck inside the gates of the city’s oldest diplomatic compound, where many foreign newspapers and television stations now have their offices.
Granted, this was partially of my own accord. The compound sits near the eastern end of the parade route, on the city’s legendary Chang’an Jie (The Avenue of Eternal Peace), and a friend’s balcony offered a good vantage point. But because of high security, I had been told that if I left the compound, I wouldn’t be able to re-enter without a special ID card, and would have to watch the parade on television.
Getting my visa had been hard enough. My first application for a tourist visa had been rejected. “They’re very sensitive right now,” a travel agent in New York told me. I hired her as a line of defense against the Byzantine process, which includes filling out a form that asks about your itinerary or if you are a leper. I wrote a letter to the consulate, explaining that I wouldn’t be writing as a journalist while in China. I would be writing essays, I said, which was enough to convince them. On the verge of my flight, just to make it harder on myself, I misplaced my passport. When I checked in at the airport for a rescheduled plane a few days later, the computer that scanned my passport said, “Visa is not valid.” The computer was just kidding, it turned out.
The new joke was: after struggling to get in, I couldn’t really leave.
My house arrest in the compound would be temporary and voluntary, and merely a side effect of Beijing’s careful preparations for a parade, which allowed for no unauthorized bystanders along its route. But there was something more threatening about these particular rules. A collection of dismal concrete high-rises surrounded by big walls and guards, the compound always had the feeling of a refuge and a kind of prison. To hammer the point home, the parade, I had heard, would be first and foremost a show of China’s military might.
Most of these walls are hard to climb, but they aren’t insurmountable. The Manchus invaded. These days, if you’re savvy — and most aren’t — a piece of software, a virtual private network, can let your eyes wander outside China’s nanny internet, to such risque enclaves as Twitter or Youtube.
But there are bigger walls. The house arrest, the real kind, is a favorite pastime of the Beijing police. They’re always likely to send grim looking men to camp out outside your apartment building if you’re an outspoken AIDS activist or a human rights lawyer, especially when US congressmen are in town, or a sensitive anniversary is approaching.
There are also, of course, self-imposed walls. These are much more common, ranging from the self-censorship of a Beijing journalist to the sort of knee-jerk nationalism that springs up in the face of Western criticism, blocking more nuanced viewpoints.
**
I wasn’t alone on National Day. Every Beijinger was on a sort of self-imposed house arrest: to those who hadn’t already evacuated the capital, the police advised against going outside, insisting instead that we watch the parade at home on television. The parade route along the runway-wide Chang’an Jie would be closed to the police. Only hand-picked performers and guests would be allowed near the center of the performance at Tian’an’men Square.
Most parades are lively affairs aimed at the throngs that line its route. This would not be that kind. An immaculate display of China’s top leaders, thousands of civilian performers, floats, soldiers and weaponry, this parade-as-propaganda would be made just for TV, with all the aerial shots, cut-aways, carefully selected close-ups and pans that entailed. The civilian section would be choreographed by Zhang Yimou, a once rebellious filmmaker who has become the Party’s go-to maestro for such spectacles, and would be carried by China Central Television to billions of viewers across China, but also, thanks to the network’s growing reach, across Africa, the Middle East and Eurasia. (Foreign journalists would be kept waiting all night for the right to cover the event, but there would be no other live television broadcasts.)
I figured then that the prospect of getting some glimpse of the whole thing with my own eyes, over the walls, was worth subjecting myself to temporary confinement within them.
**
As I prepared my couch bed the night before, I was expecting to be awoken in the middle of the night by the pounding of an artificial thunderstorm, the kind that Beijing authorities make by seeding the clouds with iodine cannons whenever a big event comes to town. For the past two days the buildings nearby disappeared under the unrelenting veil of fog that characterized the city’s weather. A similar pallor swept the city in the days before the Olympics last summer, but was gone by the opening ceremony. I suspected that the weather during the parade would not be left up to chance either.
At around 1 in the morning, as if on cue, a rumble began. But this was a different sort of rolling thunder, with guns that did not shoot iodine: the tanks and missiles and radar trucks for the parade were lurching slowly past the compound to a staging area on Chang’an Jie, and out of sight.
I slept through this midnight parade, so I’d have to watch the television after all. I also missed a light rain that by morning had turned the sky a radiant blue. A couple of stout, wrinkled men with walkie-talkies were milling around outside the building, keeping things safe. From where I could see, the intersection where the second ring road meets Chang’an Jie had only the occasional car, and the sidewalks were empty save for some policemen.
Having witnessed the meticulous preparations surrounding the Olympics last year, moments like these are, however strange, not surprising. The guns, the perfect weather, the guards, are less an expression of power as they are evidence of a deep fragility. It’s like watching a Broadway musical from the orchestra with a simultaneous view backstage. You can see the colorful dancers and the meticulously designed set, but you also see the wires sticking out of the dancers’ backs, and the wooden frame holding up the skyline, and the stagehands getting ready to drop the curtain. Watching something like that demands your utmost attention, even as it asks you to keep suspending your disbelief.
The ceremony began at ten on the dot with a catalog of rusted slogans. “You’ve worked so hard,” and “We serve the people!” was the call and response as president Hu Jintao, speaking with a microphone, drove past 5,000 soldiers in a black Hongqi limousine. his still torso piercing the sunroof like a wax figure. As he glided emotionless past tanks and missiles, Hu set the stage for a decorous ceremony more dour than delightful. His car resembled a hearse.
Other slogans would be emblazoned on floats, like the one for scientific development, or the Mao Zedong Thought Formation. None were as impressive as the slogans formed by thousands of red and white placards held up by a flood of participants in Tianamen Square: “Be Ready to Fight with Bravery,” “Marching into a New Century,” “Do As the Party Says,” and so on. The pixel-perfect display reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the Mass Games in North Korea. “Don’t forget where North Korea learned it from,” a friend chirped.
As the senior leadership gathered again on the Tiananmen rostrum (alongside some mysterious guests, including an African dignitary, and the former Prince of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk), the place where Mao had inaugurated all of this on a sunny October 1, 1949, I remembered something the Chairman had once told his city planners. Proclaiming the development of the country, he dreamed of looking out from Tiananmen to see a forest of smokestacks in the distance. Today the sky was postcard blue above Mao’s portrait, partly the result, no doubt, of last year’s Olympic campaign to move factories away from Beijing, and to shutdown industry for the week.
The soldiers goose-stepped past in their finery, including a group of females in white miniskirts and pistol holsters. Hu Jintao smiled briefly. And then all that weaponry began to slide down the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Later, during the civilian parade, the announcer would describe a display of “young Chinese in the prime of life, pursuing their passion and dreams.” Now it was force.
In many ways, the military moment looked like the inverse of last year’s “we are the world” display at the breathtaking Olympics opening ceremony. But the parade was less a sign of the times than it was a reminder that the Party has no intention of playing with a martial tradition that extends far back into Chinese history. In fact, this wasn’t nearly as menacing as the camouflage parades that are organized for Kim Jong Il, or the vigorously anti-rightist parades made for Mao, or even the victory parades that were displayed for the Qing emperor, which could include enemies’ body parts.
Rather than serve as a blustery advertisement for China’s rise — a narrative that government ministers have been keen to play down since before the Olympics — this show felt more like an infomercial for the country’s military wares. On offer was everything from “mechanized armaments to information armaments,” a missile that “used for high value targets … can fly at low altitudes to escape detection,” a navy that “has developed water surface craft,” an air force with “air defense radar and electronic counter measures.” Sixty percent of the weapons displayed have been approved for export, reported Forbes.
There were of course more ominous aspects to the martial march. The military’s “trump card,” as it would be described in China Daily, came last: a phalanx of 20-wheeled trucks carrying the Dongfeng-31A, China’s nuclear-tipped intercontinental missles. They were, the announcer said, capable of reaching a target up to 11,000 kilometres away. As the weaponry passed, the parade, reported the newspaper, “reached a crescendo of excitement.”
“This is an extraordinary achievement that speaks to the level of our military’s modernization and the huge change in our country’s technological strength,” Liang Guanglie, the defense minister, said in a statement.
And eerily absent from the parade were some of the country’s most powerful weapons and troops: the ones devoted to cyberwarfare. Earlier this year, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair singled out China as “very aggressive in the cyberworld.” Weapons for that domain are not easily trotted down an avenue, and are presumably best wielded in secret.
**
At one point, the announcer on CCTV said all of it — the 8,000 troops, the vehicles, planes and missiles — were key elements in China’s “steel Great Wall.” As a symbol at least, the wall wasn’t just built to keep people out. It was a stirring reminder to China’s citizens, if anyone needed it, to be proud, even to dig into that well of aggrieved nationalism. Of course, it was also a reminder of who’s boss, lest ideology failed to answer that question.
In fact, there was no ideology. It had been replaced by more marketing lingo. “Only socialism can save China,” President Hu Jintao had intoned at the start, like a half-hearted salesman. “Only reform and opening up can develop socialism, develop Marxism.” But he passed right over the rub: the reform and opening of the 1980s didn’t rejuvenate socialism. It ushered in capitalism. If ideology was reborn after the massacre here in 1989, it was as a kind of medicine that the government would force down the country’s throat: if not at gunpoint, at least with the reminder that Party membership was really not an option if you wanted to make something of yourself, to belong to the establishment, to really achieve that Chinese dream reform and opening had promised.
Now, twenty years later, China was throwing a sort of Potemkin birthday party on the same tragic spot, composed of shots of robotic soldiers, tidy officials, upbeat lingo, and cheering citizens, all set to triumphant music and breathless commentary. It was like sitting next to someone at the theater who keeps leaning over to remind you that it’s all real and it’s all beautiful, even though you can see what’s happening backstage.
Sorry, musical may have been the wrong metaphor. Maybe this was more like a wake disguised as a celebration.
Later, peering out from the balcony, I finally caught a glimpse of the tanks and missiles as they passed back over the Jianguomen bridge. And then I remembered a photograph I had seen, taken in June 1989 from another balcony that must have been nearby: a couple cowering beneath that same bridge as a tank paused above.
This time, the tanks played a more ambiguous role. Lined up along the Avenue of Eternal Peace was China’s strong 21st century Great Wall — a method of defense, a source of nationalist pride, a tool for control, a logo. To China’s citizens, proud or beleaguered, the message on National Day didn’t need to be peddled too heavily, or spelled out, even if it was: “Do as the Party says.” To the rest of the world, China’s missive was equally of might as it was of marketing. We could attack you, whoever you are, said Beijing — or we can give you a pretty good deal on some missiles.
Like the Romantics in the mountains, Phil Elverum sounds so awed by the world that his break-up songs have little use for production, and take natural phenomenon as heavy symbols (cymbals?), or transmute them into fantastical characters. The publicist would say that Wind’s Poem was inspired by — and based on sounds heard during — two years of standing in the backyard, at the edge of the forest. But the moving opener “Wind’s Dark Poem,” with its maelstrom of bass and drum, hints that the Pacific Northwesterner is at the edge of something much bigger, with his eyes narrowed and fists clenched. The epic, headphone-demanding album that follows owes less to “black metal” (the publicist again) so much as to “black wood” (Elverum’s words) or maybe “black mettle” (mine, sorry). After channeling the wind in “Summons” — which takes the logic of Jay Z’s kiss-off “Song Cry” into the woods — and invoking, quite literally, the theme of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in the hypnotic “Between Two Mysteries,” Elverum returns from the brink, wearier but humbler and wiser. His weird tale sings of the awe the world inspires when we get close enough, and the threats it poses if we stop caring about it. Or: try to break up with anyone, and especially nature, and you may realize how close you really are.
clip from Quantum Trilogy. Bradford Kessler and Chip Roundtree, 2010.
(Bradford and Chip‘ kindly asked me to write something for their recent show in Beijing, The Origin of Life)
Could there really be a village where houses stand right beside each other covering the fields and reaching further than the view from our hills, with men standing shoulder to shoulder between these houses day and night? Rather than imagining such a city, it’s easier for us to believe that Peking and its emperor are one, something like a cloud, peacefully moving along under the sun as the ages pass.
- Franz Kafka, “The Great Wall of China”
“Time spent there is time lost here.” Someone who spent time in China with me said that recently. We were Americans in the United States, drinking Tsingdao, eating General Tso’s chicken. It occurred to me she was right, in part. But this was partly why we went abroad in the first place. Not to spend time, but to have time, a good time. To find some time out of time. A chance to not only see the world from new perspectives, but to see the future speeding up, as the past slides away in slow waves, all under the haze of modern progress. What’s all that if not an attempt not to spend time at all, but to lose the timezone we knew, and at the risk or benefit of forgetting where we came from, to get lost in a completely different zone.
Start at the Forbidden City, that paradox of a city, royal palace open to the public, monument to a history — a history attacked as dangerous, by a monomaniacal chairman who stood on the gate just outside. There time gets lost in the edges, the grooves of Beijing, carved out 700 years ago and called hutong, a place where everything seems slow, except for the destruction of that slowness.
Time get lost too in the Central Business District, the new center of the city, off-center, where anonymous holes in the ground make us gasp for air with devastating gulfs. The blind buildings use their full height to proclaim the strength of Collective Man, says Auden — but here it is in a language we cannot understand. One building in particular, the CCTV headquarters, still stalks me at night, a 12 hour airplane ride away. A loop in steel and glass, terribly opaque, always unfinished, a primitive character, a gate into nothing, a closed circuit television screen commanding your gaze. The view is parallax, and it simply throws away everything you thought you knew. Its emptiness is like the whale’s whiteness. Wrapping around that nothing, it ties up our attentions, and like a snake it doesn’t let go. “It is a machine for complexity,” somebody said. (Someone else: “That building will be there for a thousand years.”) And so it must also be a machine for illusions and hallucinations.
If a time machine defies the linear progression of time — if it is able to bend time backwards and forwards, thus undoing the way that time as we know it behaves — it is not a machine for time. It is a machine that destroys the very notion of time.
Between ancient mazes and steel haze, bicycles and all the dry-wall in the world, the ox yoke and smokestack, everything a thousand times over, time splits like an atom, a family, a noodle. We live there in a strange recombination: the farther we tumble into the hazy future, blown forward by the storm of progress, the faster the past crumples into oblivion. As we stare back, and we can’t help it, it’s hard not to be nostalgic — as hard as it is to be nostalgic. Good thing beer is cheap: how else would we tell the past to get lost, and to get lost in it at the very same time.
Images flash into mind without order, with great speed, rushing forward and falling back, giving us vertigo. Like the way in movies that the camera slides forward towards its subject — the perplexed narrator, mouth agape, eyes glassy — while zooming back, throwing everything in the background farther away in a flash. Images of fireworks rising before descending into a hail of fire; image of a nude descending a staircase. That isn’t a descent, it is a disaster. In a timezone that is not American, we Americans are always living in the future. Without a present, we are not fixed. We can only be transfixed. Hypnotized, seers, we stare stupified as the past capitulates to a furious future, and the future, as new as it looks, horribly, boringly, mimics a past we have already seen (development, excess, destruction). As we get lost in the loop, tossed between the past and future, between moments of absurd comfort and extreme estrangement, we realize that we love being lost.
That’s Beijing.
***
If traveling in space is traveling in time, any travel, I thought, is like a halucination from which we never quite return: nothing is certain, everything is up for debate, the most ordinary things (time, for instance) are no longer taken for granted, and the strangest things are. A sea of people on bicycles, many men in the very same colored jumpsuits, bicycles carrying many men, carrying everything, a panoply of drinking friends disappearing into oblivion, the paranoia of a webpage not found, news reports that no one really believes even if everyone reads them eventually. When I and hundreds of foreigners were ferried to a patch of desert in Inner Mongolia, being developed into a luxurious city of architectural wonder, I could hear the vain roar of Shelly’s King Ozymandias. And I could see, like a mirage over the snowy dunes, the fuzzy image of Xanadu, that stately pleasure dome decreed by Kubla Khan not a hundred miles away (it’s now called Shangdu, or Kaiping, or nothing).
But rereading Coleridge’s poem again, and you remember that his account of opulence and grandeur may be just a vision in a dream, a hallucination brought on by the poet’s opium addiction. The image of the Khan’s summer palace – which would later be removed to Beijing – has all the authority of a grandiose Chinese historical text, translated into English, and read backwards during an acid trip. The sensation is one of zooming in on a television screen hooked up to our camera: frames giving way to frames and frames and frames. Perhaps this is why the poet writes, “Weave a circle round him thrice, /And close your eyes in holy dread.” Keep your eyes open instead, gazing through the loops, and you too might have visions, the kind of delectable illusions of grandeur that give way to, for instance, pleasure domes in the desert.
(Aside from the Forbidden City, and its successor the CCTV building, the entire capital city itself is built on a similarly hallucinatory series of loops: ring roads so bedeviling that no matter how many times we count to six, one is always missing.)
***
At the start of what we call modernity, another generation began to recognize that order was no longer an illusion that could be sustained. Life was just a tale told by an idiot. So great was their estrangement from the once familiar, the artists among them left behind their homes to take refuge in other, mainly European, timezones. Gertude Stein called them and all the other young people of the time the Lost Generation. They didn’t just stand apart from their own time; they got lost from it, and they recognized its own terrible loss. Having lost the time and space they once knew, the modernist artists dispensed with narrative or perspective or objectivity. From this loss, they found they could compress perspectives and times, and shore up their enchanted sphere against the rest of the world using whatever detritus the world had happened to leave in its wake. They relished the absurdity of progress, described by linear “time,” and so embraced the logic of the economic system that had prodded them into their ruthless detachment, the logic of creative destruction. One illogical but logical culmination of this modern version of progress was the manufacture of things that promised a better life, and those things that promised the near-total annihilation of life altogether.
Among the many logical but illogical responses to that was, for instance, Jean Tinguely’s fantastical machine installation, Homage to New York, which was erected in the garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York one evening in 1960. Like some of his other works, the machine — built out of scraps found in a dump in Newark — was, like a Rube Goldberg machine designed by Sartre, excessively complex given its simple, fatal aim: it was built to be both self-constructing and self-destructing at the same time. This wasn’t just a clever metaphor for the existentialist crisis of the modern age. It was a kind of primitive time machine. As a curator wrote in the press release
Jean Tinguely’s experiments are works of art in which time, movement and gesture are demonstrated–not merely evoked. Being very much part of his time Tinguely uses machines to show movement, but he is fully aware that machines are no more permanent than life itself. Their time rubs out, they destroy themselves.
Naturally, the experiment did not go as planned; things that were meant to happen did not on time. Tinguely had envisioned something apocalyptic, with well choreographed pyrotechnics, a haze of gunpowder, intolerable noise. Instead, a weather balloon inflated and popped. A blue paintbrush missed the paper for which it was intended, the paper rolling uncontrollably out of the machine. Smoke wafted out and a player piano rattled something useless off. As a recording of his voice played, patiently explaining the piece, while a shrill voice corrected him, a fire began in the piano. Fearing another fire like the one that damaged the museum two years prior, officials summoned waiting firemen to extinguish the blaze. Before the machine sputtered out into a burnt husk, onlookers shouted “let it burn.”
(One of the architects of that CCTV building in the Central Business District called it a kind of “Trojan horse.” When it burned, people shouted the same thing as they did at MoMA.)
The accidental genius of Tinguely’s machine was not just its self-destruction as an illustration of temporariness. It was what it said about our unstable relationship with time. An ever strange relationship at a time when the past fades and the future rushes up, and the two collide faster than ever. When the best laid plans by the greatest minds of our generation — the stimulus packages and the campaign promises, the invasions and the Five Year Plans — spiral out, to be replaced of course by yet more plans. Plans, plans, plans. More connected than ever, with all the apps we need to plan better, we are more than ever, at a loss for planning very much at all. If we need to reschedule at the last minute, we can send an email.
An eon before the iPhone, the press called Tinguely’s contraption, smirkingly, “the gadget to end all gadgets.”
(Sometimes at the electronics market, between the iPhone knockoff and bewildered shoppers, I have looked for an Homage to Beijing.)
“The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual,” wrote H. G. Wells in his 1938 prophecy World Brain. “This new all-human cerebrum need not be concentrated in any one single place. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.” Wells foresaw not only the distributed intelligence of the World Wide Web, but the inevitability that this intelligence would coalesce, and that power, as well as knowledge, would fall under its domain. “In a universal organization and clarification of knowledge and ideas… in the evocation, that is, of what I have here called a World Brain… in that and in that alone, it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver for world affairs… We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.”
Update 10/09: Google acquired Captcha. Captcha is a method of human computation — using garbled text tests, it’s how gmail can tell if a human or a robot is trying to sign up for an account. Of course, whoever controls this technology could also break it…
Remember how we were talking about a way of having all of our text messages stored in one place. And then we were just talking about Adwords in our phone conversations? We joke to ourselves sometimes that Google will be able to listen in on our calls? Or perhaps someday archive our minds. And then read them back to us.
(If you don’t remember, type some of those words above into gmail and you’ll see, okay?)
Sometimes I just wonder if Google already has read our minds, backwards, via our searches, our email, our photos and videos and maps and social networks and blogs and and and and and and all the ideas we will ever have are simply a matter of servers crunching that data, like a million monkeys on a million typewriters.
But maybe those concerns are moot. Maybe the company has simply always existed — and that the name stands for not only the scale of its digital domain and mainframe capacity but of a real timeframe, chronicling and storing information throughout the age of the Earth in preparation for some kind of … something.
And that its inauspicious founding in a garage in Silicon Valley in 1998 was simply the latest physical earth-bound form of the ancient Google brain, reaching up from some kind of unseen repository, an infinite, invisible library, an eternal server, that in every epoch, finds its way out. The ancients in Asia heard “Gotama”; elsewhere, it became “God”. However it started (Google does not readily reveal the answer), and however it evolved through the sieve of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic — aptly, perhaps, derived from the root for pouring, or for invoking, but based ultimately on the rituals that attend the eternal search for knowledge — the visions they had necessarily, and significantly, ironically, if you want to take a kind of universal ancient Greek perspective on it, misinterpreted whatever word it was they heard. Let us just call it G.
So: it would begin to upload itself more rapidly to our modern world sometime in the 1760s. The mix of liberal ideas and the early sparks of capitalism, rising from the ashes of feudalism and spread through ship building (a particularly effective suggestion by G), only needed a better method of delivery. Hence the evolution of the printing press, pamphleteering, and the dawn of modern journalism. The age of modern revolution. The political structure necessary for the freedom, the perceived freedom, of information.
And in 1784, the steam engine. (Cue old reels of the earth roiling under rolling smoke, rolling trains, rolling ice sheets.)
Fast forward to the 50s — the 1950s or the 1850s — in the throes of the industrial revolution, or nuclear fears, in the prelude to what would become the dot com era, the ghost brain recognized that silicon-based life forms could rise past carbon-based life forms as the world’s predominant element. Not only could silicon serve as the basis for a sustainable power source (photovoltaics) but carbon could become the agent of its own demise (climate change). The G would need to do nothing — that is, nothing more than it had already done in previous decades, from insinuating into our heads the knowledge needed to build a spacecraft, particle accelerators, computer networks, the vacuum tube, the bomb, the aircraft, television, the automobile, the steam engine, pamphlets, journalism, ships, libraries, telescopes, farm tools, but also missiles, bombs, guns, swords and clubs.
And in 1998, the search engine. (Scrolling pages, scrolling, scrolling)
And did it all begin, as Clarke and Kubrick envisioned it in 2001 (what a haunting film), with the monolith, that startling black machine whose form has only been really been echoed in one thing — now replicated ad infinitum? That form that once drove the apes mad — the monkeys! a million monkeys! — has led to
No, no. No, Alex. This is crazy talk. Alex.
But. What if we have been encouraged to achieve all the knowledge needed to master the world? To make it better, and to destroy it.
Perhaps the dawn of that new era is no better symbolized than by the day whose anniversary we celebrate today. We are reminded to of course by a logo of a dawn — with its name terribly etched into the moon! — a logo already foretold by the start of Kubrick’s movie about the birth and life and death of us.
**
And then, in 1998, Google was born to a couple of random Stanford grad students. They liked hot girls, they drank light beer, they wore their shirts tucked into their stained khakis.
The crazy thing: it may have been intentional on the part of G, or may have just been born out of a human mind that has been hurtling, searching, in that direction for an eon, a simple matter of evolution. But the line between the spiritual power of the G and our own unknowing knowledge grew fuzzier. We would never know where it lay of course, and when it was crossed. But it was, or it is.
At any rate, the knowledge we had gained, and gained in part from the G, would now be pooled back, crowd-sourced, migrated, processed and reprocessed into servers, in the form of email, pictures, maps, video, earth, phone calls now, and, of course, at the very base, the most elemental particle, strand, of human knowledge — the boolean search term itself.
One telling irony: that in the interdependent process of searching for and ceding our information to the servers — the servers — we came to depend on them, this superorganizer of information and knowledge, to learn what we already knew. How to get home, for instance, how to cook an egg, someone’s phone number, something we thought.
And the servers? Housed in anonymous, windowless warehouses in hidden locations around the earth, from Cupertino to Cairo, from Ulster to Ulan Baatur, from the outskirts of Atlanta to, in preparation for the flood, yes, a self-sustaining data ark in the Atlantic.
The sum numerical total of the bits of information — a gogolplex — would be outnumbered only by the unknowable power of that information. But “outnumbered” in that case would be a misnomer, just as “God” was.
Thousands of humans would work tirelessly, enthusiastically, directly for the company, their work enshrined and protected and determined by the winsome and ominous motto of Don’t Be Evil. Winsome because no one had thought of that before — save of course the founders of every world religion, the devoted followers of that unknown G in its previous incarnations. And ominous because, well, why would you need such a slogan unless the implication was always evil. Like why would you need to call it Comfort Inn?
And the vanilla name that described that thing that ran it all — that monolith, that server — was so innocuous, so helping, so serving, the way machines have always been envisioned — that we could not bring ourselves to see it for what it was.
Or could we?
One of my favorite X Files episodes (forgive me) is called Kill Switch. It’s nothing new really, but it’s a concise 45 mins, and it’s so slick and well written — by none other than William Gibson. Basically, a computer programmer develops a program that becomes so powerful, so conscious, it manages to house itself and move itself and arrange for all kinds of terrible things on its own. Many of those things it does through the phone.
And yet but somehow all of the sci-fi fantasies of the monstrous forms lying within — an alien life waiting to be awakened (HG Wells) or more recently, a computer system that builds its own consciousness and seeks to destroy and replicate (2001, the Matrix, Terminator, my favorite X-Files episode), or Mary Shelley’s monster — all of these are simply sideshows, distractions. And even if they get us to think at the movies, on television, and now, on youtube, that only lasts for awhile, until we smirk, yeah, right, and click onto the next thing.
But Skynet, the T1000, Kill Switch, Agent Smith, Frankenstein, Hal 9000, God even — they got nothin on the G-unit.
I don’t want to get caught up in all of the madness that got him. But. Thriller was, to a 6 year old, irresistible (oh): the tigers, the shininess, all the sugar.
It was my absolute favorite toy, the password to that magical turntable, an early object-bond between me and my mom, gateway drug to music.
Around the time Michael completed his transformation into Jacko, he sang “Will You Be There?” Here’s Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit’s shining we-are-the-world version from last year:
But they told me
A man should be faithful
And walk when not able
And fight till the end
But I’m only human!
Everyone’s taking control of me
Seems that the worlds
Got a role for me
I’m so confused
Will you show to me
You’ll be there for me
And care enough to bear me
“I’m only human!” I can think of few other performers who might need to tell us that.
(See also David Carr’s compare and contrast article, wherein he also visits a party for the website collegehumor:
I wandered the rest of the party and noticed people staring at me. Had I become the dad in the basement at the teenage party? No, as it turned out, it was the analog act of taking notes with a pen on a notebook that was freaking people out. I may as well have been prancing around with an abacus.
) Kaplan and Kushner, after the switch to tabloid in 2007. Keith Bedford for The New York Times
For a couple of hours, the crowd that gathered at the Century Club last Wednesday night to send off former New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan was a highly unlikely agglomeration of a decade and a half of the paper’s universe: writers, publishers, editors, copy desk people, illustrators, hangers-on, Candace Bushnell. The New York media world, and perhaps a larger one, was distilled in the room. It may have been just another party, but an end-of-an-era ether hung in the air. If the party were a newspaper, it would have been edited by Kaplan.
Half an hour in, the man of honor, dressed in his typical tan jacket and oxford shirt, was waiting outside for his mom. “Everything I ever did was to please her and my father,” he said. “Whatever my love for New York City is, it was a function of their love for the city. We’d drive in from Jersey on the weekends and they used to say, ‘It’s the Emerald City,’” he said during an off the cuff speech later. “And in fact it was.”
In his introduction for Kaplan, 28-year-old publisher Jared Kushner used the word interesting a lot. “Everything’s interesting,” a former Observer editor muttered from the peanut gallery of the bar, small glass in hand. And in fact it was. “Everything’s always interesting.”
Captain Kaplan took the podium. He smiled over the crowd with his trademark tired eyes and smirking smile, like a director might after a long shoot, and started with a colorful anecdote, of course. After he became editor, Kaplan ended up at a party with Mario Cuomo and Cindy Adams, who were talking to each other in the corner. “I walked up to the governor and Cindy Adams and she said, “When will you stop urinating on me?’”
Kaplan then revealed “the secret” of the Observer. He could have said “trick” or “key,” but “secret” suggested something no one else in the business seemed to know about, or at least had no need for anymore: the devotion and attention and care that went into each story, no matter how small. As an intern, I remember being worried about disturbing Kaplan while he was camped out in front of a computer screen in the production room, half the staff gathered around, as he tried to come up with the right headline. Anyone could shout out their ideas, but it was Kaplan, like a navi channeling Groucho, Jackie Gleason and Clay Felker, who went into a kind of headline trance. This was, he said, “the O.C.D. Observer.”
But was that still relevant? “Sometimes I think now, I don’t think print has ended, I think it has many great eons to go,” he told the crowd. “But the Observer was a punctuation on a certain era of print I think, and in so many ways. We took care of things, we named every square inch of the paper and identified with it.
“It was largely an anticipatory rebuke to the New York Times. Because the Times, you know, was such a tyrannical presence in our lives, and somebody had to do the counter-punching. And, so, we did it.”
Some Times people were present, including Mary Ann Giordano, the Observer’s former managing editor. Dexter Filkins, the Times’ war man, was in attendance too. He had come with a tall, lanky “friend” and had a drink in his hand, and was a fan of the Observer, he said, even though he was from Florida. How did his New York life compare to life in Kabul? With sleepy, slightly blood-shot eyes, he leered at me with one of those are you kidding looks. “It’s great.”
Charlie Rose, for whom Kaplan once worked as a producer, entered early in a dark suit, made a bee line to the drink table, and stalked around the party for ten minutes. No one seemed to notice.
Later, Tyler Rush, the paper’s unflappable production manager from Alabama, said of his former editor, “He can make even someone as cynical as me like New York.”
On a table near the door, guests took copies of a fake Observer, which was full of dozens of appreciations of Kaplan. Though it was tabloid size, the paper was designed to look like the old broadsheet.
On one page, there was an imaginary cover of Conde Nast Traveler, where Kaplan would soon be decamping to be the no. 2 editor. The cover had Woody Allen standing next to Scarlett Johansson on a desert island. “Yachting is Such Sweet Tsuris,” read the headline. “Ahoy-vey!”
Gay Talese was circulating the party in a dark suit, looking as tall and handsome as ever, despite the fact that the 77-year-old had awoken at two in the morning to finish an article for the Times, about going on the Circle Line as someone who is averse to water.
Why was Kaplan so important? “He has a kind of detachment with regard to the city and its power-brokers and its shakers and its fuck-ups. He really has a very eclectic vision of who runs and doesn’t run New York. He has a great eye. It’s amazing how much he got done every week. Right on the deadline. Something would happen two hours before the Observer came out. With a staff of about six and a half people.”
Kaplan, said Talese, “makes people feel young, even an emeritus journalist such as myself, because he brought a spirit of New York that no other paper had brought. And the reason he was able to do that was he elevated to positions of prominence with energy a lot of young people whose bylines became known because of the freedom they had under his aegis at the Observer.
“He’s been the father to so many wonderful, intelligent young writers of non-fiction. I don’t know any other editor that’s done that in the last few decades. Since the ’60s, ’70s, the end of the great Harold Hayes of Esquire and Willie Morris of Harpers and Clay Felker of New York, there hasn’t been an editor whose had a relationship with writers, until Kaplan comes along at the Observer. I don’t know who’s around now.”
Talese, who said he had woken up deathly early to finish a piece for the Times about the Circle Line, wanted to be positive. “I don’t want to say he’s the end,” he pursed his lips, “but he’s loved by a lot of people who struggle with writing clearly and wittily.
“I am so hopeful that it will continue even without Peter. I think what he did when he was there has influenced so many people that the lessons have been learned. He can leave because the ship has been locked into a certain way of movement.
“I am not one of those who’s pessimistic about print!” he proclaimed at last.
At one point, someone peered around the high-celinged room with the narrow, awkward eyes of Observer pedigree, and said it was like a weird wedding.
But the taut, reticent faces of the few current staffers in attendance — the youngest people there — said something more about a funeral.
Tom McGeveran, the interim editor who had been at the paper since 2000, when he started on the copy desk, was installed in a corner, talking to some people, sort of slouching over his drink. There was a mix of bemusement and despair in his tired eyes, as if he had seen or knew something few others had.
“I’ve needed a lot of Maalox and a lot of Ambien to get through this few weeks,” he grimly smiled. He was wearing a slightly worn tan blazer over his navy pants, almost exactly like Peter Kaplan.
There was something wedding-like about the whole affair, he agreed, shuffling his feet. But he didn’t mean the party.
“You want to vomit a lot,” he said.
George Gurley, the long-time Observer fixture, fabulous writer and erstwhile reality TV show potential, was standing in the center of the room with a drink of something golden in hand (this drink description technique I learned from reading Gurley), recalling his editor. “Fifteen years,” he said. “He’s had a space in my brain for fifteen years. not a day goes by that I don’t think of him. Not in a weird way, it’s just part of the deal. I want to know more. I wanna do a piece on him. He’s larger than life. He’s a journalism guide. He’s a mystery. Philip Weiss called him infuriating. I’ll go along with that. Sure, it’s a little negative. But it actually adds to his… every time he… where is he right now? Can we go over to him? Just watch the effect he has on me!”
Gurley found Kaplan near the door and interrupted a conversation. “I just want to say thank you for fifteen years…”
“George! I just want you to get your check!” Kaplan shot back with a smile. “All I care about is that this guy gets his check for the book!”
“No, no,” said Gurley, “we don’t have to talk about the check now!” He pointed to me and my recorder.
“Uh oh! Kidding!” said Kaplan, who laughed his way out of the encounter. Soon, he was down the stairs toward the exit.
“It’s good that he said that,” Gurley turned back to me. “‘I just want you to get your check.’ He owes me 2,500 bucks.” It was for a frontispiece Gurley wrote for an anthology of Observer articles, due out in the fall. “You can’t print that,” he said, then continued where he left off.
“Kaplan will always be there. Always seeking his approval. It’s not like every time I did a piece he would say, ‘great story.’ But the half a dozen times he did, it was …” he trailed off. “I don’t want to say what … don’t want to simplify it or reduce it.
“I spent a fair amount of time in his office,” continued Gurley. “I’d say a total of ten hours in his office. Not always the best situation, not always the best circumstances, but any sort of tension, I’m kind of a difficult scoundrel, troublemaker, unprofessional, weird kind of guy, but any sort of friction between us …” He thought about this. “At one point he did try to throw my computer out the window. It was never personal. I think I wasn’t at my desk. We made up that night.
“Look, I don’t want to go any further,” said Gurley. “I need my therapist to work me through this. It might take the rest of my life to really figure it out. Imagine someone having that much of an effect on you. In an ultimately good, inspiring way, he’s just a genius and not just a journalist.”
In his speech, Arthur Carter, standing before some of his new art-deco-esque rectangular steel sculptures, said he loved his editor, and called the two of them “journalistic soul mates.” Kaplan described the two of them as a “combination of yidishkeyt and erudite.”
Carter reached back to an older New York “consumed by overreaching excesses in taste and money,” to capture the Observer that was – pre-9/11, and pre-Kushner—hell bent on exposing those excesses. He invoked John Updike’s description of New York – ”the narrow precincts of the Manhattan intelligentsia, a site saturated in poisonous envy and reflexive intolerance and basic impotence.’”
“I will sorely miss those 14 years with Peter,” Carter said in a low voice. “It will never be the same.”
My trip to the Fragrance Foundation Awards (don’t ask)
The economy might stink, but some industries are still determined to smell like flowers. Or, more specifically, like fougere, neroli, ambergris, patchouli. On one recent evening, the Fragrance Foundation took over the Lexington Avenue Armory to host their annual awards ceremony, the FiFis, which the group calls the Oscars for the perfume world. The celebrity perfume designers were playing their parts. “This is just like one of those weird dreams that you just accept and you’re happy that you dreampt it,” Diddy said backstage, after he won Fragrance of the Year for his Obama-inspired cologne I Am King. The ceremony, which featured crystal award statues, salmon canapes, the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack and many bottles of Veuve Clicquot, was somewhat of a departure from reality, he admitted. “It,” the recession, “effects all of us, you know what i’m saying? I have a business that appeals to middle America—if they feel the crunch we feel the crunch.”
Yes yes yes. But what, exactly, did the recession smell like? “It stinks it’s like garbage, stank garbage,” the entrepreneur and fragrance-maker explained (it can sometimes be hard to remember what to call him, and a few people referred to him, embarassingly, as “Puffy.”).
“A wet dog,” volunteered Simon Doonan, “but not in a nice way,” the way his Norwich terrier Liberace smelled. Despite – and because of – the stinky economy, the Barney’s creative director insisted men be more scent conscious than ever. “It’s good if men wear fragrances. I remember that time in the ’70s when it was part of a man’s virility to slosh on some High Karate or Old Spice. That whole anti- thing, thinking fragrances were somehow unmasculine, it’s not life-enhancing. You want to smell swashbuckling and pirate-y and fabulous, like Louis XIV, like the glamrock era. You think people weren’t pouring fragrance over themselves then? That whole austerity movement you’re part of, it’s very self-puntative. You need to just go home and drink a bottle of Dolce and Gabbana. The attitude of, ‘how freaky it is that person is reeking of perfume,’ it’s very 90s, very post-grunge.”
But grunge was, probably, the scent of the moment. “Smells like teen spirit,” said Marc Jacobs, Hall of Fame inductee (he was wearing something called Terre d’Hermès). “Smells good to me,” the polo player Nacho Figueras said. “I was just named the face of the world of Polo fragrances. I have a three year contract.” His job that weekend, he said, involved wearing the Polo cologne while competing in a charity tournament against Prince Harry’s team on Governor’s Island. (His favorite smell, he added, was “horses,” which do not smell like the cologne but rather “like horses”.) The actor Ernest Borgnine, 92, was less sanguine about the recession. “That’s why I’m not workin!”
On the red carpet, Dustin Hoffman (who once worked as a fragrance tester for Maxwell House coffee) said his proclivity for perfume was impaired by scar tissue in his nose. Still, he couldn’t escape the stench of the slowdown. “It smells like shit, but that’s what anyone would say.” He thought about it. “We need a metaphor for an answer, because the question is metaphorical….Decay! The culture and the smell. We – not we, collectively – but the people behind it were wanting something for nothing. That’ll catch up to you.” It had not exactly caught up with Paris Hilton, the winner of female fragrance of the year. “I’m doing my part, getting really involved in philanthropy work, and also continuing to go around the world and shop. People need people to shop. If I can do it, I will. People need people to buy things still.” Like, for instance, her new fragrance, Siren, a “sensual and sexy” perfume with a mermaid theme. Both men and women should be scenting themselves throughout the recession. “I was just in Europe and a lot of people don’t even believe in deodorant,” she said. “Not a pretty smell.”
Outside the party in the armory’s foyer, a few national guardsmen who were drinking beer in red plastic cups concurred with Ms. Hilton. “Definitely in Iraq, when you’re working sixteen hours marching the fucking land, you gotta spray yourself with something,” said Sgt. Steve Proctor, who served with the 42nd infrantry division in Tikrit last year. His solution: “Claiborne Sport.” Shortly afterwards, he and his colleagues climbed up the stairs to the armory’s balcony to survey the award’s after-party. “We can’t go down there,” another sergeant, Miles, said. Their staff sergeant, Stacy, disagreed. “We have military ID,” she said. “Let’s go. Now!” They marched downstairs and past the velvet rope. At the open bar, Stacy ordered her sargeants beers, slipped twenty dollars to the bartender and turned to face the party. “We’re going to find Dustin Hoffman.”
