But here I fear I am becoming nostalgic. I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery: this idea of personhood is certainly changing, perhaps has already changed. Because I find I agree with Zuckerberg: selves evolve.
Of course, Zuckerberg insists selves simply do this by themselves and the technology he and others have created has no influence upon the process. That is for techies and philosophers to debate (ideally techie-philosophers, like Jaron Lanier). Whichever direction the change is coming from, though, it’s absolutely clear to me that the students I teach now are not like the student I once was or even the students I taught seven short years ago at Harvard. Right now I am teaching my students a book called The Bathroom by the Belgian experimentalist Jean-Philippe Toussaint—at least I used to think he was an experimentalist. It’s a book about a man who decides to pass most of his time in his bathroom, yet to my students this novel feels perfectly realistic; an accurate portrait of their own denuded selfhood, or, to put it neutrally, a close analogue of the undeniable boredom of urban twenty-first-century existence.
In the most famous scene, the unnamed protagonist, in one of the few moments of “action,” throws a dart into his girlfriend’s forehead. Later, in the hospital, they reunite with a kiss and no explanation. “It’s just between them,” said one student, and looked happy. To a reader of my generation, Toussaint’s characters seemed, at first glance, to have no interiority—in fact theirs is not an absence but a refusal, and an ethical one. What’s inside of me is none of your business. To my students, The Bathroom is a true romance.
Toussaint was writing in 1985, in France. In France philosophy seems to come before technology; here in the Anglo-American world we race ahead with technology and hope the ideas will look after themselves. Finally, it’s the idea of Facebook that disappoints. If it were a genuinely interesting interface, built for these genuinely different 2.0 kids to live in, well, that would be something. It’s not that. It’s the wild west of the Internet tamed to fit the suburban fantasies of a suburban soul. Lanier:
These designs came together very recently, and there’s a haphazard, accidental quality to them. Resist the easy grooves they guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!
Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook wall for a moment: Doesn’t it suddenly look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
The last defense of every Facebook addict is But it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know. If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.
At my screening, when a character in the film mentioned the early blog platform LiveJournal (still popular in Russia), the audience laughed. I can’t imagine life without files, but I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete as LiveJournal. In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.
Notes
1. See “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” The New Yorker, October 4, 2010.
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2. See Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg Opens Up,” The New Yorker, September 20, 2010.
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3. Lanier: “Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.”
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4. Perhaps the reason why there has not been more resistance to social networking among older people is because 1.0 people do not use Web 2.0 software in the way 2.0 people do. An analogous situation can be found in the way the two generations use cell phones. For me, text messaging is simply a new medium for an old form of communication: I write to my friends in heavily punctuated, fully expressive, standard English sentences—and they write back to me in the same way. Text-speak is unknown between us. Our relationship with the English language predates our relationships with our phones.
Not so for the 2.0 kids. When it comes to Facebook, the same principle applies. For most users over thirty-five, Facebook represents only their e-mail accounts turned outward to face the world. A simple tool, not an avatar. We are not embedded in this software in the same way. 1.0 people still instinctively believe, as Lanier has it, that “what makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.” But what if 2.0 people feel their socially networked selves genuinely represent them to completion?
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Travels with My Ex
Susan Straight
FROM The Believer
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IN MID-JULY. My ex-husband and I were headed to Huntington Beach because that’s where The Baller, a shooting guard who’d been playing basketball since she was seven, wanted to celebrate her eighteenth birthday.
(We have three daughters—herewith known as The Scholar, The Baller, and The Baby.)
“I hate Huntington,” I said. “My least favorite beach.”
“I didn’t want to go either,” my ex-husband said. We were driving behind my van, the dark green Mercury Villager I. Today my van was packed with teenagers. Behind the wheel was The Scholar. Next to her, The Baller. In the backseat, The Baby, along with Neka, one of our daughter’s high school teammates. And in the middle was Bink, another former teammate, and The Baller’s boyfriend. We call him our Laurie. My house, full of my little women (though they are all taller than I am), has for years seen various successions of boys who have tried to be the equivalent of Louisa May Alcott’s Laurie. This one seems close. Our Laurie is willing to sit on the couch with all three girls and any attendant girls and watch She’s the Man or Fired Up! He cooks for himself. A lefty quarterback, he throws the tennis ball accurately and untiringly for the dog. His favorite phrase, uttered with deadpan sympathy: “That’s unfortunate.”
“Look at this traffic,” I said. “This is why I hate going through Orange County.”
The I-91 freeway. Four lanes each way, often the most congested in the nation.
My ex-husband and I have known each other since the eighth grade, when he was a basketball player and I was an ex-cheerleader. (My mother had run me over, accidentally, with her own 1966 Ford station wagon, effectively ending my career two weeks after it began.)
I looked at his foot on the gas pedal. He hardly ever wears sandals. Regulation boots at his correctional officer job. Size fourteen. When we were in high school, and he was an All-County power forward, one of his nicknames was Feets. Mine was It-Z-Bits. He’s six-four and goes 305 pounds. I’m five-four. 105.
We have been divorced now for twelve years. But we still see or speak to each other almost every day. Where we live, in the easily jeered-at Inland Empire, we know countless ex-couples like us. Whether it’s beca
use we can’t afford to move away after we divorce or we’re just too lazy to dislike each other efficiently and permanently, it seems to work.
The Scholar would be a junior at Oberlin, and this summer received a research fellowship at Cal Tech. The Baller would start USC in weeks, with nearly a full scholarship. The Baby had just won a DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) award for her history scholarship at her middle school.
But that’s why I was broke. Two kids in college. A California economy in shambles. My upcoming pay cut: 10 percent. Feets: 14 percent pay cut from the county juvenile institution.
He works graveyard. That meant he’d slept for two hours, after spending the night watching two teenage boys charged with a gruesome murder.
By 2 P.M. we’d gone about thirty miles in traffic that was now, unbelievably, stop-and-go. We talked about how many police cars we’d seen that summer, how everyone we knew was getting tickets, how The Scholar and The Baller had both gotten their first citations this year under dubious circumstances. “Revenue,” Feets kept saying. “The state is broke. They have to make money, and it has to be on us.”
A California Highway Patrol car drove past us on the right, then pulled alongside the green van. The cruiser slowed, at the rear of my van’s bumper, and then pulled back up to the side and hit the flashing lights.
“What the hell?” I said.
“He’s pulling her over,” my ex-husband said, resigned. “Of course he is. Car full of black kids in the OC.”
The patrolman was shouting at The Scholar through the loudspeaker.
My ex-husband said, “I’m going, too. He’s not gonna pull any shit. I’m not having it.”
My husband has a history with cops. He’s the six-four Black Guy, the one that fits the description, the one who was seen carrying the shotgun earlier, the one the gas station attendant saw and accidentally stepped on the silent alarm, the one who “attacked” a campaign worker in Pittsburgh, the one who carjacked Susan Smith, the one you make up, but in reality the one who gets out of his car to help a woman change a tire and she nearly falls into a ditch, she runs away so fast.
“He better not mess with her,” my ex-husband said.
“It’s D——,” I said. That’s our Laurie’s name. “He’s gonna make D—— get out of the car.”
Our Laurie is the six-five Black Guy, the one with elaborate braids under his NY Yankees cap, the one wearing size thirteen shoes and a South Carolina T-shirt because he’d just gotten a scholarship offer from the Gamecocks, the one who’d returned only the day before from the high school All-American basketball camp in Philadelphia, the one with brown skin almost exactly the same shade as my ex-husband’s, the one we tease our daughter about because she always said the last thing she ever wanted to do was replicate my life.
“Where you from?” one officer yelled at us, and another held the barrel of his shotgun against Feets’s skull, pushing it farther and farther until the opening seemed to be inside his ear, under his huge Afro. It was August 1979. Westwood, California.
Where you from? Where’s your license? Where’s your car? Is it stolen? Why are you here? Why aren’t you in Riverside?
We’d driven eighty miles from Riverside, the land of uncool, of orange trees and dairy farms and a tiny downtown. I was ready to begin my sophomore year at USC. Feets played basketball for Monterey Peninsula College, and our friend Penguin was a linebacker for a junior college in Riverside County. After the beach, they wanted to cruise the streets of Westwood, the paradise we’d seen only in movies.
Feets wore tight khaki pants, a black tank undershirt, and a cream-colored cowboy hat on his big natural. Then two police cruisers sped onto the sidewalk where we walked, blocking our path. Four officers shoved us against the brick wall.
I remember how it smelled.
He was their target, I realized quickly. Power forward. His shoulder blades were wide, dark wings; he was spread-eagled against the wall.
He fit the description.
A black man with a shotgun and a cowboy hat was seen threatening people at UCLA, one of them shouted.
The cop who’d taken me aside looked at my license. Why’d you come all the way from Riverside to L.A.? Where’s your car? Whose car is it? Does your mother know you’re with two niggers?
Penguin was talking back to the cops, refusing to give them his license, and I thought they were going to shoot Feets. Through his ear.
They said a few more things to him, things I couldn’t hear. They lowered the shotgun. He lowered his arms. They told us to find our car and leave L.A. “Go back to Riverside!” They said they’d follow us, and that if they saw us walking again, they would shoot on sight.
The patrol car shadowed us as we walked. My boyfriend walked slowly, slightly ahead of me. I knew he was afraid of the bullet that might still come, if he moved wrong. We went back to where we belonged.
What did the highway patrolman want? The Scholar had been going thirty-two miles an hour, between stops. She had always signaled.
“The right taillight’s going out again,” my ex-husband said.
“My seat belt is still broken,” I said.
My ex-husband fishtailed in the dirt of the shoulder, trying to pull ahead of the van and the cruiser. The patrolman was yelling louder, his voice echoing off our door. “Ignore the white truck,” he shouted.
“Pull behind him!” I shouted.
“No, then he’ll get scared,” my ex-husband was shouting.
I knew what he thought: if the officer got scared, he might shoot us.
The Scholar stopped, and the cruiser stopped, and my ex-husband accelerated and went around one more time, a terrible dance which wasn’t funny but it kind of was when the highway patrolman leaped out of his vehicle then, agitated, staring at us, holding both arms wide in the air, saying, What the hell?
He had reddish blond hair, big shoulders, sunglasses.
He looked straight at me, and frowned. And that was good.
Oddly, this summer I read Travels with Charley: John Steinbeck, riding in his truck, named Rocinante, with a camper shell on the back, with his large French poodle, named Charley, who is “bleu” when clean, which means black. When they hit New Orleans, a man leans in and says, “Man, oh man, I thought you had a nigger in there. Man, oh man, it’s a dog. I see that big old black face and I think it’s a big old nigger.”
Once Feets and I were camping across the country in a different truck—a blue Toyota with a camper shell—and we spent an uneasy hot night in McClellanville, South Carolina. At dawn, he got up and took a walk beside the Intracoastal Waterway. While we slept, the campground had filled with hunters. I lay in the camper, and from the open window near my head, I heard a father say to his young son, “See that big nigger? That’s a big nigger, right there. When you get older, I’m gonna buy you a big nigger just like that.”
I never told Feets exactly what the man had said. I just said there were scary people here and we should pack up and leave. We did.
If there’s anything scarier than Fits the Description, it’s Routine Traffic Stop.
The names or faces we’ve learned over the years. A brother in Signal Hill. Rodney King. The Baller’s basketball coach’s brothers, both of them. My younger brother’s best friend. Shot nineteen times in his white truck as he maneuvered on the center divider of the freeway, having refused to pull over. He might have been high. Either hung up on the cement or trying to back up. No weapon. A toolbox. He’d just delivered a load of cut orangewood to my driveway.
“I ain’t getting out,” Feets said. He had his hands on top of the steering wheel.
“I know! I’m going,” I said. I needed to get my wallet.
“He better not mess with her,” he was saying.
“I’m going!” I said. We both knew it was my job. I bent down to get my pink leather tooled wallet. My job is to be the short blond mom. At school, at basketball games, at parent-t eacher conferences, in the principal’s office when a boy has called The
Baby a nigger and the male vice principal sees my ex-husband—BIG DOGS shirt, black sunglasses, folded arms the size of an NFL linebacker’s, and a scowl—and looks as if he’ll faint.
My job is to smile and figure out what’s going on.
By the time I got out of the car, the patrolman was looking at me, and The Scholar was pointing at me.
The traffic roared past on the freeway, twenty feet away from the silent weigh station. I took my sunglasses off and felt my mouth tighten. Who had smiled like this? (A foolish smile that angered someone. Custard inside a dress. What?)
“Why did you stop? What are you doing?” the cop said loudly at me.
“That’s my mom and dad,” The Scholar said, aggrieved. She wasn’t scared. She was pissed. Her default setting.
“We’re on our way to the beach for a birthday party!” I said, cheery and momlike. “Her dad and I didn’t want to get separated, ‘cause in this traffic we might never see each other again!”
The little women hate when I do this. They imitate me viciously afterward. They hate that I have to do it, and that I am good at it.
The Best American Essays 2011 Page 25
