THIS IS NOT ABOUT HACKING

This post is in steps that go from the very specific to the universal.  The subject is the Internet and its degeneration towards paralysis.  This is not about hacking.

Picture a little old lady in her nightie at 4AM composing a message for an English publisher of an article she wrote.  Suddenly her computer is turned off by some outside force.  In a minute there is a message that comes on -- though the computer is off -- in a little label to say that in another minute it can be turned back on.  This is true.  An automated message is sent to Apple.  The heading is “Panic Response” and the rest is code.

LOL mentally pictures a transmission tower destroyed in the nearby forest fire; or the sun’s current outbursts sending a tongue of destruction to all satellites; or WWIII breaking out and Dick Cheney is at the door; or a tsunami.

Later in the morning LOL (me) contacts the techies in Great Falls who have the contract to “support” 3Rivers, my provider.  They are very selective about what they consider “support” and simply give me lots of boiler plate.  There’s a little edge of sarcasm.  “If these people don’t know what they are doing, they should stay off.”  They don't listen to what I say, but have prepared speeches for the most common problems and talk right over the top of me.

I call friends.  Then Google.  The story is that Yosemite OS is wiping the entire hard drives of MacBooks, destroying Wi-Fi, installing hard-to-remove malware, and generally raising hell.  People are scrambling to get rid of Yosemite, which is not easy.  There’s a thing called Mavericks.  Maybe I’d better think about Linux.  IPhoto won't work unless I update, but the update is not available in the US.  IPages won't update but at least it works.  It won't update because of "security reasons."

The only reason I signed up for Yosemite was that my social websites and movie providers claimed they wouldn’t work without it.  Clearly an underground collusion for extortion.  And we worry about China.

_________________

Now picture a little community on the prairie that is dependent on industrial agriculture: that means small grains and alfalfa raised under irrigation from the mountain run-offs with giant ag machines, many chemicals, and a storage and shipping system that reaches around the globe.  The town only supplies amenities for the few hundred people on ranches and so on:  schools, stores, library, gas pumps, a bank branch, churches, one grocery store.  One or two little businesses few of whom know how to run a business online.

Everyone keeps their heads down.  Computers are for kids and men, who only operate spreadsheets and monitor the commodities market.  TV is for vegging out with exhaustion after a hard day.  Few can get up enthusiasm for town council meetings, infrastructure meetings of any kind.   They will not join together to make the town computer-friendly.  If surveyed, they say they want to eliminate dust, potholes and chickens. 

The power infrastructure produces “dirty” electricity and every now and then there’s a “brownout” that destroys some machines -- fridge, computers.  The telephone is old and faulty-- lots of wrong numbers, ringing when no one is on the line, etc. 

Power and telephone are operated by cooperatives but they are not TRUE cooperatives because no one has the time, energy or information needed.  3Rivers contracts out  tech support to a Great Falls organization that serves several outfits.  They have a steady stream of techs because of the Air Force base.

The techs are not likely to be local, though computer adept kids are close to being ready, but with those skills they can travel.  Malmstrom people follow orders.  No questions.  They see MAC on something like the same terms as high school rival athletic teams, sort of a necessary evil.

______________

All the prairie states are corrupt.  All states are corrupt. Places where large territories are privately owned (ranches) or leased from the government (ranches) then the power goes to people who have territory (ranches).  Now the problem is not lots of little people who live out to the edges of their income, but corporations who pretend to be people and bend the laws to suit themselves.  They are quite possibly in Japan. They do not join telephone cooperatives.  They might own their own satellites.  (Sat phones work on ranches a lot better than cell phones because of terrain.)

Prairie states are full of legal and technical artifacts  because there is not enough population to insist on updating and because the young tend to leave rather than reform.  Old folks control many institutions for the same reason.  They lose brain grip but deny it.  In their minds, their health is based on endurance and mental health is based on dominance: so long as they can dominate, they’re okay.  They do not want to give up, nor do they want to go to a doc who might be a youngster or a girl.  Sometimes the doc himself is losing it.

Once people get a foothold on corruption, they know where the bodies are buried and can use threats to reveal to deflect regulation.

No one has ever made a study of the many old ranchers, miners, loners, obstinate hermits who have died with no will or family.  Where does the ownership and money go?  Lawyers know.

________________

On the ground floor, this shuffle is shafting people through something they had come to think of as a pleasure, a communal possession, and a safety device in case of national attack. They are surprised, indignant, but they don’t have any connections or power or understanding of what the problem might be.

___________

The economy has now dumped out a lot of potential tech coders into a world they thought would be better because of their college and grad school degrees.  To keep employed because of their massive student loan burden, they are taking dumb jobs that only SEEM like they pay well because rents and food in the area are so high and because their work is grindingly boring.

But the bait is strike-it-rich (the ‘49ers could have told them) brilliant new ideas that will put them on top.  Instead they mostly think up ornamentation that demands more time and attention from users.

The internet is international, universal.  National boundaries will not hold back the predators, even if they are aimed at the nation.  The internet is one of the humanities, just like the arts.  No boundary can hold the humanities.

Power goes to violence as enforcer when the offense is material and the fruits of most piracies are material goods.  So the punishment is also material goods, maybe human bodies or habitations.  Maybe priceless cultural treasures, not sold but destroyed.

We are discovering that, like the relationship between energy and matter, communication translates to structure.  But how?  Terms? Consequences?  DE-struction or CON-struction?  But that’s way too complex and abstract to help an old woman at 4AM caught in a revolving door of passwords.  And must she check yet again to see whether her IP is blacklisted for spam at someone else’s computer?

________________

Maybe I should rethink everything.  Streaming films means being limited to pop trash.  Putting energy into daily blogs means the long manuscripts are neglected.  Maybe I’m too tied to an old-fashioned system or old-fashioned notions of what writing is about.  Maybe my cloistered life is not protected enough.  Maybe it’s TOO guarded and I’m not getting the big picture.  Or maybe it’s not me at all.

All this is over-reacting to a simple common struggle with the internet?  I don’t think so.  It’s just a symptom of something bigger than me, maybe bigger than all of us.  And it’s growing.  I think of global warming.

Almost immediately I get this comment that couldn't be posted:  . . ." I really liked your piece this morning. I tried to make a comment but I was closed out a couple of different ways, proving the point of your writing!"  He used my email, but it is often blacklisted.  I checked Spam.haus.org.  It was okay, but it doesn't list everything.

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

This is just a set of reflections about the writing/publishing/bookstore/reader nexus, not so much about the internal forces that give rise to writing, which interest me a lot more.  My motivator is that I have enough short stories for an anthology I’m calling “Wry Love Stories for the Dry West” and am thinking about where to send the manuscript.  If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve probably read most of them.  I’ve sent some of the stories to www.ropeandwire.com which is a fascinating website that holds on tight to the old-fashioned understanding of Westerns (Fifties television, Zane Grey).  They are a gentle bunch, almost universally male, and they LOVE the gun and death-dealing alpha males, which makes you wonder.

Recently the owner of the site, whom I like very much, asked if I had another story, so I sent him “French Milled Soap,” about the mail order bride who does her duty but no more until a blizzard nearly kills her husband but carries them into real love.  It was rejected, on grounds that it was too sexy and the site is meant to be for families.  So I wrote the bloodiest story I could imagine, “La Femme Rouge,” and sent that.  Praised and accepted.  Go figure.  

I saw that Newwest was accepting stories about the West and thought of sending something but there were two problems.  The current story is written in such predictable and overwrought rococo prose, nearly 19th century, that I wondered whether it was meant to be parody.  Is that the standard?  Ropeandwire.com loves this kind of thing, sort of spaghetti Westerns in print.  One writer in particular, an older man, turns them out almost by the hour.  A man on a horse, a canyon or mountain ridge, an adversary, a death.  A ritual.  Mixed metaphors, vivid prose, slightly arcane.

For a while I was pretty good friends with Richard S. Wheeler until I ran into Montana literary politics and decided to give the whole damned state a rest.  Instead I’ve been writing with Tim Barrus, who is working a global frontier almost beyond imagining if you’re in Montana.  It makes guns seem merciful.  But I think that Wheeler and I spy on each other through our blogs.  http://richardswheeler.blogspot.com/  Like Barrus he has a long history with publishing.  Unlike Barrus he resists the new technology, the new ways of writing, the new audiences, globalization, and so on.  I just sit here like a cat and watch.   Lately Wheeler has been thinking out loud on his blog about readers, genres, the business of publishing, and all the other confusions.

I remember when the first self-published lady author who specialized in stories about children healed through the love of a horse was admitted to the Western Writers of America  http://www.westernwriters.org/ and how horrified Richard was.   The Western Writers of America was once the only quality-marker for publishers besides the academic Western Literature Association. http://westlit.wordpress.com/about/  The WLA is soon meeting in Missoula.  The just-past president of the organization was so horrified by Barrus that though he has been a correspondent for years, he now totally rejects me.  He is an expert on Cormac McCarthy, the most atrocity-focused Western writer I know.  Go figure.   The blog of the WLA is now focussed on pop culture, hardly academic at all. 

People at parties -- on discovering you are a writer -- inquire whether you are published in the same way that -- if told you are a minister -- they ask if you are ordained, because they think this eliminates charlatans.  They have no idea how to judge the implications of WHO the publisher was, what the sales figures or critical response was.  Nor are most people equipped to evaluate denominational requirements for the ministry or the quality of this seminary as compared to that.  For writers whose ego is based on being published, the recent crater left by the implosion of publishing is a torture and a prison.  To say nothing of a threat to one’s income, perilous in the best of times.  Wheeler has now recovered to the extent of publishing ebooks.

My own writing is split between working with Barrus and his boys and my own writing.  In some ways I act rather like an agent, searching for venues and publishers out on the edge.  Since Cinematheque works more in image than in print, and more in the style of a poem  (the intense or lyric moment) than a narrative (though a narrative is always implied), the values are intensity, meaningfulness for a narrow but global category of consumers (boys at risk who may not speak English), and CGI effects: overlays, conversion into quadrants, loops, distortions, arty stuff -- not the constructed realities of computer games.  The point is that my writing can lean that way. 

But I find that I’m old and slow when it comes to technology and though I’ve got a digital camera now and understand that it will do video, I don’t want to take the time to learn how.  IMovie on my MAC computer is not even hard to do, and my background in theatre and film is enough for me to probably do good things but I have a whole series of print projects queued up ahead of that.  Neither do I want to give up any time for conferences around the state -- book selling festivals that mean only BOOKS, solid old-fashioned BOOKS, even as the Valier library is now equipped to loan out Nooks and teach a person how to download ebooks from the Montana State Library.  Even as one cousin’s husband so generously sent me an iPod with audible books already on it and I’ve found out where to download more.  I just don’t want to take time to learn all these things that so fascinate kids and men.  I’m still expanding my actual writing skills in print.

I initiated a little six-person panel of cousins and friends (my peers in age and education, and all formidable readers) to balance out the seductions of boys in vids.  They love bookstores (so do I) and libraries and have many books of their own.  I’m also on the mailing lists of such eclectic people as Peter Koch, http://www.peterkochprinters.com  at the extreme high end of fine printing, and Barry McWilliams  barrytoons@dishmail.net , a Montana cartoonist who once taught English in Browning.  I am ever so grateful for the continuing forwards of Dave Lull, who has no website but a huge webwork of contacts.

Today’s is a terrifying world, not because it is different from the world in the past, but because we know so much more about what is happening.  Tim started a project called “Show Me Your Life”, assuming that he would get heart-breaking stories of boys living in the streets.  He was jolted when the footage from the pocket vid cameras he sent out included beheadings and gang rapes of children.  His first witnessing child in the Congo died from infected machete wounds because there were no antibiotics and he was HIV positive.  You can find much the same thing on YouTube.  Tim’s work is mostly on www.real-stories-gallery.com  "Show Me Your Life" - Tim Barrus | Real Stories Gallery   Don’t go there.  You can’t handle the truth.

Speaking of YouTube, I’m still trying to figure out how to think about the young chimp trying to get a toad to give him a blow job.  It’s not just a terrifying world, much of it is inscrutable OR so minutely scrutinized that one hardly knows how to assimilate what one now knows.  TMI is a real phenomenon.  Which is why I’m letting all the fancy tech stuff fall by the wayside.  I even lose control of my sentence grammar sometimes.  It seems to me that the core issue I must address is how to be human.  I do not want to turn away from the already-dying suicidal boy trapped in Russia with no human contact except Skyping Tim on the Internet at 2AM, but I do not want to derange or challenge gentlefolks who simply want to read a story they can put down at the end.  I’m past the point of putting things down.  Except in print.