I hear the click of grasshoppers, like a short laugh. I hear a man in a distant campsite laugh as I write the word in my journal. Chipmunks run around, their tails little exclamation points. My phone has died, of natural causes, at 11:54 am on Saturday, July 20th, 2024. I have a peace knowing it’s dead. I sit here in the woods, excited for my next book, The Great Unknown, by Marcus du Sautoy. I’d actually started it two months ago, but hadn’t continued. All about the limits of what can be known, I’m eager to skip forward to the section on consciousness.
“‘Dead cell-phone battery,’ she said.” —Station Eleven, p. 319
I have, however, just finished Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. I’m hard-pressed to describe the shape of the plot, though the details have given me pause. Dubbed recently tenth on The New York Times’ “100 Best Books of the Century,” it takes place in a world where a particularly virulent flu strain forever altered the human experience. Left it without, among other things, the technologies held so dear. I’m remiss to lump everything under technology. Writing is a technology, probably my favorite if I had to choose. Clark, the PhD executive fixer, starts his Museum of Civilization with naught but an obsolete credit card, driver’s license, and dead iPhone.
“‘I heard it’s supposed to be a place where artifacts from the old world are preserved,’ August said. The man laughed, a sound like a bark” (p. 146).
One of my many vocational goals is getting students interested in older technologies, namely writing and books. I entered this field ten years ago, stoked and well-stocked on what I thought were needed: words. Words and their connections, the neural network in my head so far unmapped and not emulated. But when I bring up one to a student, le mot juste for the moment, and they hold out their phone to enunciate it to Siri, I realize that many preconceived notions I had about being a teacher need updating. And this was what was so intriguing about Station Eleven: The characters in their teens and tweens stare uncomprehendingly, rapt with “little rectangles that played music” and laptops “like books” that are dead. Kirsten, main character, admits she doesn’t remember what the screens looked like. The Internet has long since “blinked out,” and is, to quote Clark, “hard to explain.” Imagine a world where electricity is again waiting to be discovered and you have the setting for one of the many interwoven storylines of Station Eleven. I’ve asked my students on many an occasion, deadpan: “Have you ever heard of the Internet?” They have. And they know where it is, too. The young people in Mandel’s novel can’t even conceive of the concept.
“[T]he point wasn't actually the electrical system, the point was that he was looking for the Internet. A few of the younger Symphony members had felt a little thrill when he'd said this, remembered the stories they'd been told about WiFi and the impossible-to-imagine Cloud, wondered if the Internet might still be out there somehow”. (p. 38)
We camped here a year ago. At the time I was reading James Gleick’s The Information, a perhaps unsinspiredly titled tome about pretty much everything related to the technology of, not just this moment, but many watersheds in history. Sitting in the duff of the forest floor, the air redolent with campfire smoke and the hot, sweet scent of pine needles, I was introduced to Claude Shannon and the true meaning of the Information Age (it’s about Information Theory, not the ubiquity of the Internet). The history of word change to keep up with invention. Talk about entropy and black holes and I’m brought back to the quiet of the campsite, only the stridulation of cicadas and crickets. My introduction to the vagaries of quantum memory. OK, so I’m waxing a tad poetic. I’m not a science major, but a humanities. Point is, Gleick’s Information was literally (literarily?) the starting point on a journey that just ended with Station Eleven. The former adroitly discusses the foundation of thought as modern humans, augmented by the technologies of writing, print, and the Internet, experience it. Station Eleven shows writing to be the mysterious, wondrous thing it always has and print as something exotic and new. The Internet—the place that “was us,” to quote Mandel—is no longer anything. I don’t know if I can conceive of that anymore.
“Doesn’t it seem like the people who struggle the most … are the people who remember the old world clearly?” (p. 195)
I dreamed last night that I was delivering newspapers in an old apartment complex. It was night. Heavy, ink-stained canvas bag around my shoulders, I riffled through a few 8.5 x 11 sheets on which were printed details I needed for my route that morning. New to me was a list of individuals, neighbors who had been determined by some AI algorithm to be future customers and that encouraged the building of rapport in order to make the sale. I also dreamed that I was teaching and, as sometimes happens, wasn’t ready. A kind student called me out. Strange thing about the former was that AI had come in later. I briefly registered in the dream that the publisher had only recently started using artificial intelligence, but (on reflection upon waking) in a way that didn’t follow its adoption in the non-oneiric world. In the real world, tech has, stepwise, all but upended traditional means of information transmission. Schlepping my canvas bag to deliver the news is beyond obsolete. I awoke.
Truth is, I’d known about Mandel’s book for years. I saw it last week in the little library box across the street. When I initially apprehended, around the time it was published, that it was only dystopian, not science-fiction, I looked the other way. What made me take it home this time, however, and read it, was the similarity of my own “remember when” story of the recent pandemic. March 2020. I’m in a class at college dedicated to Margaret Atwood. We’d done Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye—to this day one of my life’s most impactful novels, several poems and short stories. The final book of the class was the first in her dystopian science-fiction trilogy, Oryx and Crake. As details about a pandemic swirled around us and slowly settled in, the class as a whole read and realized that the virus in the book was engineered and disseminated by Crake. I’ll never forget that moment. The world outside slowed down shortly thereafter and then came to a stop. That Mandel would take the trope, of a global epidemic, to a literarily satisfying conclusion four years before I experienced it for myself was, I felt, enough of a chip to break down and finally read.
“If I’m not mistaken, they never said Covid was over,” declared a friend over coffee last week. In Eleven, the Georgia flu just sort of recedes into the backdrop and isn’t again mentioned. I’ve been hearing about the coronavirus again; the president has it, apparently. And last Friday’s IT shutdown—arguably the worst in history opined one pundit—rendered a sizable portion of the world’s information infrastructure unusable. As my phone is dead, I can’t check how it’s going. Reading about the ravages of the Georgia flu, the simple vectoring that left “99.9% of the population dead” is probably the plot element I found least plausible. Having lived through a pandemic and two bouts with its virus has rendered real what Mandel was speculating on. Perhaps she was riffing off the early 2000’s SARS outbreak? Either way, the rampancy with which the virus goes through the population can’t, I don’t think, happen, as the virus needs hosts. Oh well, no big deal. It sets us up a fascinating world. And ours did indeed alter it: Vicious bipartisanship. Fear-mongering and mis- and disinformation. I think about the way young Gen-Z has come to view public school. A show of hands when I query students how many turned off their cameras to play games during distance learning was near-total. Reemerging into the harsh fluorescent light of public school I’m sure has felt for many a kid to be the biggest waste of time on the planet. General posture and frequent recalcitrance, if outright indocility, testifies to this truth, in my opinion.
My phone is back on. I was able to charge it at the lodge (had to go inside as an outlet on the patio wasn’t working; didn’t respond when I pushed the ‘reset’ button) and find these quotes:
“If English is 75 percent redundant, then a thousand-letter message in English carries only 25 percent as much information as one thousand letters chosen at random. Paradoxical though it sounded, random messages carry more information.” —J. Gleick
And this:
“The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been struggling for utterance in you.” —O. Chambers
I ping back and forth between the two ideas contained herein all the time. The second, written in the early years of the 20th century, has kept me reading for decades (I didn’t really need my phone as it was all but memorized). The first, encountered last summer, has helped narrow my reading focus to what’s really important. After a while, what one reads does indeed become redundant, the overlap—unless one needs something reexplained, see quote two—a waste of time. I chose to read Mandel as the advertised post-pandemic setting helped articulate the aforementioned story struggling in me for utterance. The Gleick quote applies as I did not expect to encounter a world in which the newspaper was new—the publisher, Francois Diallo, minor character, has an old printing press. I’ve been trying to encapsulate the modern age, ever since I apprehended that the Internet, all the information from Gutenberg and before was, to quote Kirsten’s reverie “all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze.” To read about a world bereft, kids not understanding, nigh disbelieving that a 737 could “take off,” has helped more than any agmination of gloss on gloss about Silicon Valley and the Information Age. Well, those glosses have helped, too. “[F]rankly maddening,” writes Mandel, “given how much time these people had to look things up in the internet before the world ended.” The present moment is still pollinated with wonder and possibility.
I read Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto about a decade ago. I was working at the bookstore at the time and as the novel wound down, I found myself reflecting on the final phrase of the back cover synopsis: “…towards its shocking, inevitable conclusion.” Spoiler alert! That’s exactly what happens. Based on a true story, Patchett nonetheless fleshed it out for fiction. I remember thinking that the last line at least prepared the reader, if softened the denouement. Later editions leave out the phrase. I remember locating a new copy on the shelf and noticing that the synopsis had been rewritten so as to not give it away. In contrast to Patchett’s, the last line of the synopsis on the back of Station Eleven (the front cover of which features a blurb by Patchett) talks about “the strange twist of fate that connects them all.” I wouldn’t say there was one “twist of fate” in Mandel’s novel—aside from the virus, I guess. Maybe not the best synopsis; at least nothing’s spoiled. A blurb on the back, however, helped shape my overall opinion. I don’t have it in front of me, but it talked about how all the loss therein and defamiliarization of the mundane actually points to the beauty of the present moment. These wondrous gems of existence that we leave behind in our march forward. This is what I want my students to be excited about. The world that has come before, atop which is this fragile infrastructure, offers so, so much treasure. In Eleven a character on the other side of the country questions the practicality of teaching younger generations about a long-gone world. In my opinion, we are living in an extended moment between two. Worlds, that is. We may not know what’s coming, but we need to know, more and more, from where we’ve come.
I found this article a good reminder of the stores of information I have all around me that is not the internet, or 'interweb', as one of our cousins says. Altho I am a 50's child, I tend to think of my phone's interfaces when I want information. Josh reminds me of other, more dependable resources I have. Like books. Thanks Josh. ♥️