The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

by Michael Harris

  Here is Simone de Beauvoir on chivalric love: “The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love.” Tomorrow’s lovers will have a hard time understanding that. All their knights will sit, forever, at their feet.

  Gay or straight, it’s in our sex lives that the distance between online abstractions and our lived experience is most intensely felt. The crowded, sense-depriving focus of an online experience is the opposite of the spare, sense-gorged experience of cruising the sidewalk at dusk. And isn’t it often the weird, unaccountable qualities in a person (his Woody Woodpecker laugh, the way she hugs her friends too hard) that draws us to those who aren’t our “type”? If, in our online pursuit of love and sex, we lose those intangible signals, will we one day forget their value so completely that future generations—mired in ever more complex variants on this same perma-readiness—will find it difficult to recall that valuable absence for themselves? The world’s largest dating site, PlentyofFish, has seen a massive shift from desktop usage to mobile usage—80 percent of their activity is now run off cell phones. And when users make the switch, they discover an intense love of instant feedback and constant gratification: The number of messages they send jumps by a factor of three or four. Mobile users check their PlentyofFish messages an average of ten times every day.

  We might grumble to our grandchildren about the days when people picked up lovers from sparsely populated bars with the same antiquarian fustiness that a fifteenth-century scribe must have felt when the printing press spewed forth those millions of bound volumes. And there’s a sad, rare quality to this nostalgia: We will lament what was lost for only this tiny moment in time. Few in the future will go looking for loneliness.

  • • • • •

  It would be disingenuous to omit my own sexual career from all of this. My experiences are timid, but, like sixty million others, I broke down one lonely evening and created a profile on PlentyofFish. The spotty results bottomed out with an ornery graduate student whose photos were the most generous things about him.

  After I’d bought us a couple of coffees, we started walking the seawall bordering Stanley Park and he grew increasingly irate at the confusion of bodies around us. A child in its mother’s arms let out a holler of joy when a flock of birds flew by, and my companion pulled a sour face.

  “Don’t you hate that sound?” He shuddered.

  I looked at him. “The sound of children laughing?”

  “Exactly.” He picked at something in his teeth.

  There was a pause. And then, casting my eyes out over the crowd that swarmed the seawall, I gave a little jump and pretended my phone had started vibrating in my pants. “Hello?” I said to nobody. “Really? But I’m in the middle of a date.” I looked at him while I held the dead phone to my ear. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

  “I think I made a bad impression,” he huffed as we hurried back into town.

  “No, no,” I lied. And a moment later, as he went in for a hug, I looked down at my phone again. “I have to . . .” But all I could manage was to hold up the device as though the thing itself were a vague yet unimpeachable excuse.

  Later that week, in a moment of melancholy, I found myself creating the sort of slapdash artwork that nonartists sometimes make. I tore from a book of Pablo Neruda poetry several short love poems, which I then stapled together, making a long scroll of them that I could nail to the wall by my computer. On this scroll I recorded, in thick black marker, the messages I was receiving from suitors on PlentyofFish. Neruda would begin, “Thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body,” and a PlentyofFish suitor would conclude, “Sup, cute pics.” The juxtaposition depressed me in a satisfying way, and I kept the thing nailed there to remind me what I was missing.

  A week into that staring, I went against my better judgment and made another online date: this time with a guy called Kenny. Under “Likes” he had listed: This American Life; Animation; Climbing. I like those things, too. But by then I had learned to expect that the person I was about to meet had little to do with the avatar I’d made a date with.

  We settled on beers at a swank place in Vancouver’s Gastown. “Your photos were dark,” said Kenny as I sat down. This shocked me because I hadn’t considered that others might feel fooled when they met me; somehow, I never thought of my own online persona as a ploy. I could see the man before me adjusting his idea of “Michael” into a breathing, broken creature. Meeting an online acquaintance in person is always an exercise in disillusionment. (Perhaps the photo is old or softly lit; perhaps the baseball cap strategically covers a balding head.) In old-fashioned meetings, you never have the opportunity to indulge in idealized visions of the person until you form them yourself, in a love-addled haze.

  Kenny and I, anyhow, chatted over a flight of European brews and a couple of soft artisanal pretzels. About what, I’ve no recollection. My only distinct memories are: his comment about my pictures; the moment he got up and asked to switch seats so he could make sure some homeless guys didn’t steal his bike; the pressure of his hand on my shoulder as we shimmied past each other around the table. And later, out on the darkening sidewalk, a hit of soap and shampoo as we went in for a hug (no kiss) good-bye.

  The American media adviser Lyman Bryson told us that technology is always about explicitness. Technologies—and online technologies especially, I think—focus our attention on one cramped view of things. They cut away the “haptic” symphony of senses and perceptions that make up real, lived interaction. The smell of fresh soap, say. Marshall McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, writes about the garden of senses that we gave up in order to focus on the purely visual business of reading. Maybe we lived a long time in that garden once. Now we trip into it only on occasion, as though it were a strange gift and not the ordinary, real world. There was that brief, heart-thrumming moment with Kenny on the street, though, when I felt something hopeful start up.

  Like my entire generation, I seem to be drawn toward the Internet’s fluttering promise of connections, and then repulsed by it, in equal measure. And I feel that, in the end, the Internet will win. On my solo walk home—after I left the man I now call my partner—I might have enjoyed the chance to reflect on his charms or run our conversation over again in my head, committing to memory his favorite beer, the color of his eyes. Instead, I clutched the phone in my pocket, hoping for any slight vibration.

  • • • • •

  Two Years Later . . .

  Since the day Kenny and I met on that simple evening down in Gastown, the world has carried on, churning out newer and faster ways to connect (or feel connected). I am equal parts amazed and disheartened by the yenta services that have come along. One enterprising company sent me a press release announcing a site called Qpid.me, which helps users test relationship waters by sharing verified STD results. Meanwhile, an app has been released in Iceland that allows users to bump phones and check whether or not they’re cousins before having sex (Iceland, we are to understand, suffers from a particularly redundant gene pool). I cannot disparage the utility or good intentions behind such efforts. But I can grouse.

  As for me and my man, we are now beyond any online help, it seems, enmeshed as we are in the soft machinations of domestic life. The cleverest innovation we employ is the concept of “date night,” our standing Thursday evening engagement, when the obligations of friends and families are put on hold and we content ourselves with games of Scrabble and walks through the tony neighborhood up the hill where we like to judge the mansions. There’s something disheartening about having to schedule “dates” in this way, but the alternative appears to be no romance at all—leave a vacuum unguarded and life fills it with cocktail events you didn’t need to be at and episodes of Veep.

  Date night was instigated after ten months of laughter and fights, when we decided to move in together. We found a place in a 1
930s brick walk-up, not too far from the homes of our siblings. Ours is a one-thousand-square-foot apartment with a sizable living room where we both said we could get some real work done: He would draw and I would write. The light was good, the floors were hardwood; we could see a line of smoke blue mountains from the window—past the parking lot and through the crisscross of telephone wires.

  For a desk, we lugged home a nine-foot-long kitchen countertop made of solid oak, to which we bolted a set of $10 IKEA desk legs. Monday to Friday we sit alongside each other at this desk (I’m there now). A squat table lamp in the middle quietly marks the boundary between his zone and mine.

  So I sit here typing and Kenny sits there sketching. We’re not supposed to talk when we’re at work (at the desk). We’re alone together. We take silent turns filling the teapot and will take breaks to play stupid games we’ve made up or to walk around the block. But mainly we’re sitting here pretending to be alone. I look over occasionally, to be sure of him.

  • • • • •

  What was it that brought us together, exactly? An algorithm chugging along on some server, yes. But what beyond that? I want to know what the brain behind PlentyofFish looks like.

  And so, one not so important day in August, I ride an elevator twenty-four stories up to the company’s spanking-new headquarters. Seventy-four staff members rotate through these rooms, young folk mostly, in T-shirts and jeans, lined up at long rows of computers. In the cafeteria, baskets of snacks are on offer. I’m ushered into a meeting room called “the Elgin Sea,” where I wait for CEO and founder Markus Frind.

  When Frind arrives, he’s roughly what one would expect: a computer geek’s physique, bolstered by the quiet confidence of someone who made more money this morning than you will all year.

  Frind was crafting virtual tours of real estate developments when, in his off hours, he wrote the PlentyofFish code out of his living room. There was no way of monetizing the site at first, but it seemed a good way to learn some programming skills; he threw the switch on his dating site after two weeks of work.

  A few months later, the site was pulling in $1,000 a month in advertising revenue. “I thought, Wow,” Frind tells me (though he’s not giving me a wow-face). “About eight months after launching it, I was making three grand a month and I quit my day job. I didn’t hire anyone else, though, until four years later. By that point I was making ten million a year.”

  The reticence to hire may be explained by the fierce competition of those early days. “There were hundreds of dating companies coming online back then. But now, you know, we can’t steal market share from competitors anymore, ’cause there’s no one else to kill.”

  I tell Frind that his Web site brought my partner and me together, thinking he might smile; but he’s heard this before. Maybe a few million times. “So how exactly did your software decide to put my picture in front of Kenny’s eyes, and vice versa?”

  Frind refers to the system as a “black box”—meaning he’s not always aware himself of the choices his software is making. But the math comes down to shared interests. If two people share qualities that other successful couples have shared, then PlentyofFish’s algorithm will assume you should check each other out. I field the old idea that opposites attract, and Frind says, “Yeah, opposites attract and then they attack. We’ve found that if you share interests, you’re twice as likely to stay together.”

  And most shared interests, he tells me, boil down to a similarity in disposable income. “Income tells us everything,” Frind says. “There’s a lot of matching that’s based on income. And education, too, but that’s a proxy for income. I mean, you’re not going to match a doctor with a carpenter; we know that if you have a PhD, you won’t date someone without a high school diploma.”

  “Sounds harsh.”

  “Yeah, but we model on what actually happens. People don’t like to hear it, but this is the way the world works.”

  Other matchmaking decisions are equally strident. “If you’re a guy, you’re never going to see a girl that’s taller than you,” says Frind. (He gestures at me and says, “But for gay people we drop that criterion.”) Also, men looking to be in touch with women more than fourteen years their junior, or men who use graphic language in their messages, will find their communications blocked. “I looked at a bunch of metrics and was wondering how we could get more people dating online. We saw there was a small group of men just looking to hook up, and the theory was these men were making women leave.” (PlentyofFish is especially solicitous of its women, since they make up only 40 percent of their user base.)

  By the time we shook hands, I saw Frind as a friendly, businesslike man who captains a ruthless, brilliant, and efficient service. And I saw it was actually up to individuals, then, to draw something meaningful or romantic from the vagaries of Frind’s teeming crowd. From a mass of sixty million, draw one person to love. And then, against all odds, make it work. It was more than a little unsettling to see that such a calculated and crowdsourced system had brought us together in the first place.

  CHAPTER 9

  How to Absent Oneself

  Ah, where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?

  —Milan Kundera, Slowness

  FROM the driveway, Douglas Coupland’s house doesn’t look as if it belongs to a person interested in the future. He lives at the foot of a wooded cul-de-sac, on the side of a big green hill, just a couple of blocks from the house where I grew up. His gravel driveway is shrouded by banks of bamboo, and the house itself—midcentury design—is edged with schools of handmade pottery, the kinds of pieces that friends bring back from trips to the Gulf Islands. I’ve come here to talk about absence with Coupland because he strikes me as a writer who knows how to live well in the digital world. His books—from Generation X to Microserfs to jPod—deliver portraits of contemporary souls both adrift in their tech-addled world and discovering new meanings, new interpersonal revelations that sometimes reach a comforting, even religious, tenor.

  Coffee in the living room. A wall has been bolted over with plastic toy parts so it looks like a motherboard designed to process the zeitgeist. Coupland (fifty-one, with the white and swept-back hair of a medieval herbalist) is searching the room for an answer. I’ve just asked: “When was the last time you went a day without the Internet?”

  “A decade ago,” he says at last. “My IT guy screwed up and I was offline for two days in London. But other than that I’ve been online every day since the nineties.”

  “You never go offline on purpose?”

  Sip of coffee; mini grimace. “I’d go crazy. You remember when Wikipedia had its one-day blackout? It totally crimped my lifestyle.” This surprises me, maybe disappoints me a little. Maybe I thought Coupland would tell me that the secret to writing a dozen international best sellers was that he did e-mail only once a week. . . .

  He continues: “There have been these little milestones over the years—when I canceled the newspaper, when I started cooking with the Internet, these little things that tell you your brain’s been colonized.” It’s a colonization Coupland likes, though. He Googles about one hundred times a day, and at the moment, he’s wearing a black bracelet that tracks his sleep patterns; every REM cycle is nicely charted with multicolored bars.

  To Coupland, the colonization presents us with an intellectual paradox—we know everything and we know nothing. Shoveling the Internet into our brains gives us a mental state where “we acknowledge that we’ve never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we’ve never felt stupider.” The word he uses to describe this paradox is “smupid” (a portmanteau of “smart” plus “stupid”). Smupid people acknowledge their enhanced intelligence but feel stupid because the info was just way too easy to access. There’s a Financial Times piece he’s written that gives an example of smupid thinking: “Last month someone showed me a page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and I looked at the words o
n the paper and I kept waiting for the article to translate itself. I felt smupid.”

  I tell him I’m interested in undoing my own smupidity by trying something drastic—a vacation in the tech environment of my childhood. “I want to take a month off from the Internet,” I tell him. “An e-mail sabbatical. I’m also going to leave the phone at home. It’s sort of like a reverse Rumspringa.”

  “Man,” he says, squinting across the room. “You couldn’t pay me to go back in time.”

  “You don’t think there’ll be any value in it?”

  “Well, maybe. Are you expecting a revelation, though? I mean, you can take a sabbatical from the Internet if you want, but it would be like taking a sabbatical from shoes.” I feel foolish, then, and don’t know what to say next.

  A few days later, Coupland invites me back to talk some more. We sit in a work area off the kitchen this time—amid piles of books and papers, scribbles of ink and cobblings of Lego and hits of primary color buzz the room up with the beginnings of eighty-two thousand ideas. We’re into the coffee again and our laptops are facing each other so I get the feeling we’re about to play a game of Battleship.

  We start talking about Alan Turing and his conflation of human intelligence with computers. Coupland’s saying, “You know, it may be that our emotions are just the simplest way to code certain information—” Then there’s a rattle outside. A blue jay on the gravel. Coupland gets up to feed the bird through a slat in the window. A moment later, the bird’s skirted around to a pond. “Oooh, beauty moment,” he says. And we pause the tech talk to watch the jay, whose own opinions shall remain unpublished.

  I ask again about absence.