SOCIAL MEDIA AT THE VANITY FAIR

I read "Pilgrim's Progress in the 8th grade.

Haven't made a lot of progress since then.

My new Vanity Fair came today.  Of course, like Playboy readers, I only read the serious pieces.  But since I had medium.com on my mind, this quote from an article called “Zuckerberg Unbound” caught my eye:

“With Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg built more than a business: he created a culture, combining the ethos of subversive hackery and the fervor of a messianic cult.”  The evolutionary sequence goes Facebook/Twitter/Medium with a few other steps in between — the same people reinventing their carnival wheel.  I warn people all the time that Facebook is a scam, an invasion of their privacy, building a dossier against them, and selling out to peddlers of junk.  They laugh, tell me I’m paranoid, and claim they’re only on it for family photos.  

And, they say, they have nothing to worry about being revealed — what could they possibly being doing wrong that should be kept secret?  These days no one minds being outed.  Who cares if people know they have cancer?  Of course, they’re not married to the person they live with, they don’t declare everything they buy in Canada, and they rat out friends sometimes because who would even know?  It’s just on the Internet.  Why should the government worry about which books they buy from Amazon?  Come to think of it, why are other countries upset by Facebook?  If you say,  “What if the culture changes and something you think is fine becomes criminalized?”  They laugh — there is only one culture: theirs.

Antonio Garcia Martinez was Facebook's Ad Exchange Director 

at the time this photo was taken.

Antonio Garcia Martinez’s article (one of three on social media in this issue of VF)  says, “Facebook wasn’t some measly social network like MySpace but a dream of a different human experience.”  “Engineers ran the place.”  “Famous and rage-filled engineers.”   “If you could get shit done and quickly, nobody cared much about credentials or traditional legalistic morality.  The hacker ethos prevailed above all.”  Numbers are what gets sold -- that's why magazines sometimes offer incredibly cheap subscriptions: so their numbers go up so they can sell advertising.  They don't give a flip about what the content is or whether it gets read.

Don’t send grandma photos of your kids in the bathtub.  They really bring in the numbers on pedoporn sites and anyone can pull them off Google Images.  I should probably be more cautious about looking up definitions of street slang, but I don’t know how subversive the words are until I look them up.  To literal-minded nannies, no doubt I seem dubious.  

I suppose that’s why my email gets block-listed all the time.  That means a private contract company your internet provider covertly uses to stomp on naughty people without being held responsible has put you on a list that turns away messages without you knowing.  They don’t seem to be quite in touch with contemporary culture, which has no boundaries.  

No book I’ve written that is on a PDF or printed by www.lulu.com or published by a university press is NOT available in a hijacked version on the Internet.  Hijacking IS publishing.  When I checked my Twitter account just now, I discovered that two versions of Spongebob and a “Trump for Pres" committee had invaded my list of followers.  Ack.

The big name social media have got contemporary down to a religion.  Product loyalty, karoshi  (Japanese word for overworking oneself to death), self-imposed slavery, and high school fervour for sports teams, disguised with Latin slogans.  This is a culture, the one that creates a product and then embellishes it to the point of it dropping of its own weight.  Sort of like Christianity.  Which crucified its leader.  But there are so many great artifacts left to buy.

There are other cultures: the “subversive hackery” one that creates the companies in the first place and that somehow makes their founders and CEO’s into unsustainable gods, worshipped today, fired tomorrow.  Eventually crucified upside down like Peter. 

Then the cultures of the consumers.  I don’t think I can describe them all.  They tend to be even MORE subversive in goals, but entirely exposable by your local CSI team headed by McGee and Abby.  All about sex and money.  Maybe a little blackmail.  Or extortion like the parties who just hacked the U of Calgary internet and restored it again for a mere $20,000.

McGee (halfway between Jimmy Stewart and Nick Cage)

but smarter.

More than that, there are people who gather in a place like medium.com to pretend they are devoted to fine writing or some such (they assume it equates with celebrity which everyone knows is honorable), which allows other folk to attach to them in comments, so that a post with some appeal to it will accumulate a list of comments that sounds like blurbs on the back of a trade paperback.  

The contrast between the post and the comments is sometimes so marked as to be funny.  Genre writers (mysteries, Westerns, Sci-fi) do this blurb thing among their friends and fellow members of whatever promotional societies they attend.  Western Writers of America and so on.  (Nice folks, by the way.  Smart and funny.  A little long in the tooth.)

Larry McMurtry

I often say that around here the local culture consists of someone doing something a little new, and then everyone telling them what’s wrong with it.  Often, the wrongness is only about not being cool, which is a consensus concept.  It’s pressure towards conformity.  More high school.  "Round 'em up, roll 'em in."  

But then there are the mommies, often using pseudonyms and eager to comfort someone or give them something nice.  They “top” by helping.  They’re full of praise, clearly accustomed to admiring crayon masterpieces by taping them onto the refrigerator.  They are sure that if you really want something, you can get it, do it, whatever.  Be a genius.

They like the therapist role, too.  They’re eager to pry out every detail of someone who might be important and exotic, but those are exactly the people (or the people who manage them are) determined to protect themselves with misleading bits and impenetrable walls.  Last night I watched “Tab Hunter Confidential” (Netflix).  Because of profit-protecting dynamics, we all totally mistook this honorable man and made his life a horror show.  Literally.

Tab Hunter

Any whisper of sex/love and the Harlequin comes out in the mommies.  They’re worse than Noah for pairing off, except that secretly they believe they are the better half of every pair.  They’re the woman behind the throne.  The prostitute who has contempt for all but her most famous clients.  It’s not just a gender thing — guys, too.

But these are mild phenomena.  The real devastation is described in James Wolcott’s article about Twitter tweets carelessly tossed off and converted into napalm by the same forces that produce witchhunts, lynchings and kangaroo courts.  Wolcott’s money-shot last comment is “the occult theory that Donald Trump is a comments section brought to life — the Golem of our grossest utterings.”  (Did the Jews say that Wolcott was entitled to use one of their figures or is he a Jew?)  Trauma warning.

"HI THERE! WANNA . . .?"

This month’s Vanity Fair includes an article describing hook-up culture in terms of the new sortware programs.  The idea is a pic, thirty words or less of self-description, and an address.  Maybe it starts out a date, maybe it starts frankly with a question about whether things normally considered perversions are okay with you.  It sounds like prostitution, but without any money.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating.   “Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse” by Nancy Jo Sales.  According to their own computer records, some of these men have slept with a hundred women a year.

What echoed in my head all the way through the article was San Francisco in the first wild gay freedom days after penicillin and before HIV.  Someone asked, “How much sex would men have if they could?”  The answer was “more than you can imagine.”  

Close contact (I’m not saying “intimate”) is related to disease because the best vector for human diseases is another human.  That’s sort of like the best food for humans, the one that includes all the basic elements, is other humans.  But cannibals end up eating the other person’s diseases as well as their vitamins.  So the brain disease called Kuru was not cured but was avoided when people stopped eating human brains.

Scientists are working hard to find ways to eliminate HIV virus from the human body.  They can do it with monkeys’ parallel SIV virus.  Well, some of the time.  They’ve got a number of strategies going, some of them as ingenious as a chess game.  But monkey behavior, when the monkeys are in cages, is pretty easy to predict and control.

The one element of every disease that can never be brought under control is the behavior of human beings.  The people who are into serial shagging are adult, well-educated, gainfully employed, attractive, etc. etc. and they are destroying their ability to form relationships long enough and reliable enough to raise children.  They know that.  But they do it anyway.

I’m guessing that most places are not as dominated by glamour and status as Manhattan and it’s Manhattan or similar urban centers that seem to be “into” these hook-up games.  I mean, there’s a certain amount of bed-hopping that goes on everywhere, but then the chief of Great Falls police says that drugs reach into every community in the state.  He says that today he sees the arrests of the children of the people he arrested when he first started out.  But it’s quiet and behind the scenes.  The game of hooking-up isn’t so much fun if no one is watching.

Both of these are related to economics.  In a money-based society where marriage or extra bucks for a really good car or house can make the difference between success and just-getting-along, sex is not just Tinder, but also illegal or legal tender.  The question is, like the state of the environment, is it sustainable?

In a society as malleable by media as ours is, we come up to these sudden culture pivots every now and then.  This one is much defined by the conviction of movie writers that a man/woman relationship is the center of the universe.  They also believe that sex and love are the same.  

The problem is that social scientists in the real world, as well as scientists working at experiment benches (who may like their work because they’re antisocial) are finding that sex, like most things, is a continuum.  I was explaining to the Trash Roll-Off Lady who is generally “hip” but hadn’t yet gotten past the idea that male “homosexuality” is real and inborn and that there are only two options, like a questionnaire: M or F.   Instead, research suggests that the desire dial evidently is set early in gestation of the fetus -- anywhere from male, to a mix, to female, to children all the way down to null.  None.  But that’s just a potential.  Add environment, personality, circumstances, etc.  Add the molecular influences on sex as one goes along: self-generated, purchased, by-products in food, recreational drugs, infections, gut bacteria.  

Just now I read an article from Aeon.com about how cells form a film.  It was about how adjacent cells attach to each other.  In my simplistic version, there are potential sites for attachment spaced out along the surface of the cell.  Inside the cell there are filament structures, sort of bones or frames.  If the tip of one of these filaments contacts a point of attachment, then a connection is formed and the sheet of cells widens.  It seems to me that’s a nice metaphor, because it relates the internal world of the entity to the many potentials for connection.  But it’s still basically random.

What if a person ideally suited for a lifelong attachment full of joy and fulfillment is standing next to you at the bar in the illustration for this story, but you’re so busy hooking up on your iPhone that you never notice her or him.  (Do these services include both sexes -- um, I mean the array of possible desire modes and genital configurations?)

Another new concept is that of the person as a process, a constantly renewing and developing entity, shaping according to the forces it meets, even defying or departing from the double helix, through the epigenome.  What if this person is the love of your life, not because of decades shaping and being shaped by you, but because they happen in a random world to turn out just like you.  But then along comes a major plot twist and neither of you is the same anymore.  I guess you can’t blame a computer for that.

So where is the line between guessing compatibility by a flash on the tiny screen of a smart phone, and enough actual time together to discover whether you can make a real connection?  I think it’s a moving boundary and it all depends and nothing is forever.

But the potential for real damage in this half-roulette, half cyber-game, sort of approach is pretty high.  Naturally for the men and maybe even some of the women, that might be part of its attraction, flirting morbidly with the idea that this might be Jack the Ripper.  Or that this might be someone who will give you HIV.

READING VANITY FAIR

When my copy of Vanity Fair comes, I push everything else aside and go through page by page, tearing out the perfume samples and tucking them into my pocket, stopping to read the editor’s page and Christopher Hitchens (his hair is growing back), looking at all the photos and following the captions to see what the photos are of.  All that is about the consumer upper class that controls or at least marks out so much of public life.

I might do this process twice.  I also pull out all the extra thick paper and blown-in cards.  Then I tear off the whole front half with the ads in it.  They are hardly for me.  Mostly they are meant for young people or old people with enough money to pretend they are young.  Or who are looking to buy their own young person.   After that I have a much lighter mag so I can -- as they used to say about Playboy -- read it for the essays.  The funny thing is that you COULD do that with Playboy.  There often WAS good content.  (I had two brothers.  I read anything I come across.)

Now I start from the beginning and read the articles, skipping all the ones about starlets and singers.  I can’t tell them apart anyway, so why read about them?  

I usually don’t understand the stories about the movie biz or deep corporate politics but I read them slowly and try to get it.  Mostly it improves my vocabulary and once in a while I get the big picture.  This is considered men’s stuff, I suppose.  It’s about “game” -- as are most of the articles, really.  I appreciate the “smack” lingo and tone.

I read the ones about computer stuff, which are becoming more crucial and complex as time goes on.  This recent issue has me understanding a little better the whole Stuxnet crisis and the potential to bring civilization to its knees.  I’m wondering about malware affecting satellites and rocket launches.  I’m paying attention to the theory of origins and objects of attacks.  No one is pointing any of this at me or even at Valier -- wait, there’s a intercontinental ballistic missile site just over the hill from me.  Might be decommissioned.  No one tells. 

And then there’s a huge wind farm within eyeshot to the north that will soon (whether we like it or not) be connected to Canada, computer controlled.  It’s not necessarily about the objects of destruction but about points of entry to the bigger system.  Stuxnet was originally inserted into the system, they think, by using a flash drive or “thumb” stuck into a laptop.  This week at the library I noticed a scruffy guy in a dirty ball cap that said LAPD on it.  He had a gray ponytail and I didn’t know him.  He seemed to be looking at dating sites and chances are he was unemployed and looking for a friendly woman.  But maybe not.  Our library is a hotspot and tourists park just outside to use the access.  This makes some people nervous.

In line with the idea of particle-izing and then commodifying everything, there was an article about the guy who developed Twitter (where are you, what are you doing, meet up in the town square for a revolution) and the new program he’s working on, which is called “Square.”  It’s a way of by-passing banks for direct pay through, say, American Express, by using a merchant’s swipe attached to the side of a smart phone.  (Not in Valier.  I don’t think our system supports smart phones.)  I read Vanity Fair articles like this alongside the articles in the big time reflective websites like Edge.org.  They often mesh rather well, esp. when the topic is something like medical issues.  DNA research is very much like and enabled by computer developments.  And money.  There’s no use in being nervous -- full speed ahead.

I had a long love affair with Outside magazine a couple of decades ago and perhaps that’s why I’m less in love with the adventure articles now.  I mean I started with Richard Halliburton when I was in grade school and still have “Romance of the Road.”  One of these days I’ll get to Bruce Chatwin.  Still, if someone like William Langweische is writing, that transcends mere adventure and begins to reach for the meaning of life.  The first article I consciously read by him was about the World Trade Towers and it remains the account I trust the most.  (I don’t trust the majority of stories about that event but I’m not one who thinks it was a conspiracy -- I think it was more a perfect storm of incompetencies, including the building inspection.)

Of course I appreciate the articles about authors and artists, though it’s all very much about Manhattan with maybe a little dash of LA or Europe.  Not surprising.  The mag is missing the whole elaborate scene of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel.  I suppose they think it’s unsophisticated, but the dynamics are about the same.  And the money, although it’s old-fashioned resource development money.

There is a certain class of people who have one foot in the megacities with their glamour and danger, their politics and technicalities, and the other foot in a local scene somewhere undeveloped, practical, simple.  In an underachieving way (I don’t have enough money for the city) this has been my strategy.  To participate in ordinary local life full of weather and history is to stabilize one’s identity in a way that’s not really possible in a shifting scene of high theatricality and deception.  Cities are places of culture-mix which can be creative or just confusing, even damaging.  It’s hard to tell the predators from the prey.  On the other hand in a rural setting one must behave as the locals do -- unless you have a lot of money.  

I’m perfectly comfortable in this village.  In fact, I can survive here but I can’t survive in the urban “fast lane.”  Strange food, late hours, too much booze, unknown people underfoot as guests and hired help, and I’m destroyed.  Anyway you have to fly to get there and I’m through flying.  But it’s amazing how much of that life one can access through the web, UPS and Netflix.  In fact, the main luxury in a small town is time.  Lots of lovely time.  So I have time to sit on a sunny spring afternoon, reading and tearing out  the fragrant pages of a slick mag while the town backloaders scurry around out there, rearranging the snow, and Performance Today swells and ripples on the radio.