Living on the internet

Last week, while waiting for the bus back home, my host dad William gave one of my brothers (Alexander) a toy gun to play around with. He was shooting tiny yellow balls and laughing and running to recollect them. My dad and I sat on a bench smiling at Alex’s enjoyment, and then my dad leaned in and told me that he’d given Alex the toy because today was Alex’s birthday. I was about to wish him a happy birthday and was feeling bad for not knowing earlier when my dad said, “It’s a surprise. We haven’t told him yet.” When we got back home, we had dinner like normal, and then my parents turned the lights off while my older brother, Richard, brought out a cake for Alex. Alex was delighted, beaming, and thrilled to be presented with a single gift—a battery powered wind-up truck. Sure enough, he’d completely forgotten that it was his birthday.

In the United States, I have a hard time imagining any child past the point of self-awareness not knowing when their own birthday is. Certianly our parents generally make a big deal about it, asking who we want to invite to parties and what gifts we’d like to receive, but once we’re old enough to know that one day a year is our special day, we start keeping track. I’m not sure what makes that different here—maybe rural Ecuadorian children are much less likely to be willing or able to keep precise track of the date, or maybe birthdays just aren’t a huge deal here the way they are back home (I suspect a bit of both). And now with Facebook, the rich and technologically privilged of the world (of which I’m definitely a part) have gone beyond the possibility of not knowing when our own birthdays are. Every time you log in, you’re greeted with a list of friends who are celebrating one more year of life—perhaps you’d like to write on their wall, or send them a digital gift? It’s so easy to keep in touch with people who are thousands of miles away and so easy to keep tabs on every single person you’ve ever run across in your life.

I’ve waffled back and forth with my feelings about the ever-increasing amount of information that’s just a click away from our fingertips. As much as I understand the dangers of digitizing my brain completely, I love having so much available to me. I’m completely addicted to information, and have been for a while. I spend over half of my income on books and magazine subscriptions. I’m constantly reading something. I got into journalism mostly because I realied that it’s a free pass to talk to anyone about anything you want and learn from them. Now, I follow almost 200 people on Twitter, mostly other news sources, and I’m constantly checking my feed for links to interesting articles from the New York Times, Mother Jones, Good, Slate and a million other sources. I love having a real-time idea of what’s happening, love that I can get links to five different commentaries on the same piece of news which all build off of and complement one another. But I’m starting to think that combining the seemingly unlimited potential of the internet with my information-craving brain is like building a meth lab in the basement of an addict. To be fair, information, unlike meth, is good for you in moderate amounts, but I  think there might be a limit to how much it’s healthy to know.

People, especially ones from older genertions, have been lamenting the effects of technology on the brains of our youth for as long as I can remember. As a child, my mom put a weekly limit on my and my brother’s computer time—four hours a week. We kept dilligent paper logs of our time (it would never have occurred to me to lie about it), and while the limit was at times annoying (like when I was just about to beat Pajama Sam for the six-hundredth time), I don’t remember it being a huge burden in my life. I didn’t really start using the computer much until seventh grade, when it became my after-school social life (AOL Instant Messanger and LiveJournal), and then in eigth grade, when I started using it more for research for school. The internet was certianly part of my life, but it wasn’t my main activity or a place where I spent the majority of my time. I read books. I talked to my friends on the phone. I went to movies. I wrote in a journal.

How quaint that notion seems to me today. I still do all of those things—I read a ton, I watch movies, I write in several journals, I talk to my friends. And I do almost all of it online. My hours spent reading books cover to cover have been replaced by my steady stream of online news and downloaded PDFs of books and articles. Sure, I read print a lot too, but nowhere near as much as I used to. I call my friends on the phone occasionally, but mostly, we communicate via Facebook wall posts, email messages, G-chat and Skype. I journal in print when I need to work something out by myself, but I blog much more regularly. And almost all of my media comsumption—TV and movies—takes place through Hulu, Netflix, YouTube or illegally downloaded media that plays right on my computer screen. Sometimes, I feel like my life is bending ever-so-perfectly to fit the narrative Justin Timberlake lays out when he plays Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, in The Social Network. “We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the Internet,” he says, and I see my future laid out before me. And it scares me.

I love technology. I love the convenience, the information flow, the ability to meet, be connected to and stay in touch with people from every corner of the globe. I love the things social networking has enabled, love that the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street probably couldn’t have happened without Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. I love that it’s possible for me to teach myself about anarchist history or edible plants around Seattle or how to can fruit without ever leaving my room. But I’m worried about what it’s doing to me, to my relationship with people, with reality, with hard work, with secrecy, with anonymity.

Because of the internet, I’ve largely lost the ability to be uninformed, to make a conscious choice to not pay attention to current events or world news. Sure, I go hiking or backpacking and I don’t check my email for a week. But if it’s there, if I have the opportunity, I’m always online. If I’m not online, there’s always a to-do list in the back of my head for next time I am—check email, update the blog, come up with a witty Facebook status describing my adventures, check the New York Times to make sure we didn’t experience nuclear winter while I was away. I can’t focus for very long on any one thing—I always have four or five windows open and I switch between them, reading a chuck of each at a time. I do the same thing with books and magazines—I can’t sit down and read something for longer than about ten mintues before I get distracted by something else, even if it’s just another book. Some of that is just the way my brain is wired. I’m always thinking a mile a minute, always planning what I’m going to be doing next. But the internet has definitely accelerated the trend.

Besides just my brain, I’m getting a little unnerved by how much of my life takes place on the servers of Google. I use their search engine any time I need to look something up. This blog is hosted on Blogspot, which Google owns. I frequent YouTube, use Gmail for all of my email, use Chrome to browse the internet, Google translate to help me with Spanish papers and Google Maps anytime I need to get somewhere. Now I even have a profile on G+, their newsish social network. I don’t think Google is an evil empire, and I believe that they’re going to continue to be an absurdly successful company (which is why I surrendered a bit and bought a share of their stock). Google certianly doesn’t know everything about me, but if you add in the information from Facebook and Twitter, you’d probably get a pretty decent picture of my life. And that scares me a little. There’s nothing incriminating about me online as far as I know—no pictures of underage drinking, no nudity, no calls to arms other than occasional references to defending our land against things like the Keystone Pipeline. And it might be a bit hypocritical for me to complain about all of this data being out there when I’m the one who put it there in the first place. I think the pros of visibility—getting to share ideas, meet people, have interesting dicsussions—outweigh the cons, which is why I’m as wired in as I am. But it’s still a bit scary to think of how much of a digital paper trail is out there with my name on it, how much someone could learn about me without even needing to spy on me or hack into my accounts.

I talked to my dad about this over the summer a bit. He frequently warns me that everything I post on my blog will exist forever, and that I need to be careful about what I say so as to not scare off future employers. (I try to bite my lip and not point out that this advice seems a bit forced coming from someone who’s in the middle of starting his second company and hasn’t had a boss since he quit his job at Microsoft in 1997.) At one point, we talked a bit about my LiveJournal, which I used primarily in 8^th and 9^th grade to be an angsty teenager and talk to my friends about the drama going on in our lives. My dad said he felt sorry for my generation, because we don’t have the capacity to re-invent ourselves; everything’s out there forever. I said sure, maybe, but it’s not like the friends I’ve made at Whitman are going back and reading my blog from middle school and using it to form impressions of the person I am now. No, he said, he didn’t even mean that. He meant that because we have this permanent online record of ourselves, we’ve somewhat lost the capacity to re-invent ourselves in our own minds. Back when he was my age, you could do stupid stuff and forget about it. You could grow into a more mature person and let some of your youthful  angst and adventure fade away in your own mind. But I can’t do that. If I want to, I can recall with painful clarity the conversations I had with my best friends when I was suicidal in 7^th grade, because I have our AIM chats saved on my hard drive. I can go back and read my LiveJournal entries where I was whining that no one took me seriously and my family was driving me crazy, see all my friends’ comments and still feel guilty now for being so self-absorbed and needy for so many years. My self-perception has been shaped by my digital archive in ways I probably can’t fully comprehend.

It’s not bad to know yourself. But we’ve gotten increasingly caught up in this idea that pieces of data—discrete points in time—are ourselves*. As programmer Jaron Lanier says in his book You Are Not A Machine, data always and necessarily underrepresents reality. My sense of who I was in 7^th and 8^th grade comes almost exclusively from my print journals, my LiveJournal archive and my saved chat conversations with friends, because my memories of those years of my life are too distant to be clear any more. In other words, my self-perception is based off of a series of points, not a continuous arc. And those point cannot hope to convery the rich complexity of my life. During those years, I was a mess. I was depressed and borderline suicidal for most of a year, and that’s mostly what I wrote about. Looking at the data points I have, I find myself wondering how I survived. But those points aren’t the sum total of my life during those years. I had moments of joy, of laughter, of happiness, of enjoying time with friends. I read books and got new ideas and joked around and thought about things besides the best way to hurt myself. And those barely register in the data I have. It’s like I have a photo album that’s missing a third of its pictures.

And as it does this to the past, I worry that technology is also datafying our present. I am a person. I experience a variety of emotions—crushing lonliness, extreme joy—that cannot be captured online. The other day, I was walking home while the sun was just starting to set. I’m in the middle of a cloud forest, in what I’m pretty sure is the most beautiful place on earth, and the sunset was almost too much for my brain to handle. I was full of so much emotion seeing all of that beauty, I was running and skipping and shaking my head and telling my friend that seeing things like that made me want to sleep with someone or believe in God (he, naturally, told me that I’m ridiculous). And you absolutely cannot have a moment like that on the internet. Data cannot possibly hope to represent something that real or raw.

Because of that, I think I compartmentalize myself. There’s my online identity—someone a little crazy who cares about activism and food politics, who overthinks everything and pretends to be an anarchist every so often when she gets upset with politics. My status updates and tweets and blog posts all fit into this narrative. But that’s not all there is to me. I do the same thing with events. For me, a birthday isn’t just a day when you turn a year older. It’s a family dinner, it’s a thing that will show up on my Facebook friends’ sidebars, it’s an opportunity to create the perfect event page to invite people to my party. It cannot and will never be as simple as it was for my brother here, who didn’t even know it was his special day until his parents told him.

I love the internet and I love technology. On the whole, those things have done far more good in my life than bad. But they’re also changing who I am, who we all are, the range and spectrum of experiences that are possible for us to have. I’m going to keep spending a lot of my time online, because there are tools and information there that I value. But in a completely digital world, Alex’s simple happiness at being presented with a birthday cake is not possible. And that’s why, unlike Sean Parker, I never want to live online.

*This point comes from an amazing article called Generation Why, which deconstructs Facebook and the impact of social networking on our self-perception. You should go read it now.

Friendship in a post-civilization world

For the next three weeks, I’m living in the Intag cloud forest region of Ecuador. The area is dotted with tiny pueblos which are tucked into valleys and nestled on top of ridges. The roads here are dirt and cobblestone, and they wind up and down hills through a green mosaic of forest and small agricultural plantations. I’m living with a family in Peñaherrera (population about 150 families) and commuting 20 minutes each day by overcrowded bus or motorcycle to Apuela, another small town where the regional newspaper I’m working for is based.

This year, I’ve spent a lot of time in places where life runs a lot slower than my usual mile-a-minute pace. When left to my own devices, I will triple-book myself from 8am-10pm, schedule conversations with friends to make sure I have time to see them, have sixteen windows open on my browser and spend the bulk of my day trying to get as much out of every second as I possibly can (that or watching stuff on Netflix). In Ghana, I got used to waiting for hours for people to show up for interviews in their villages because they were out farming or couldn’t catch a ride or just didn’t feel like showing up on time. Every night, I went home to a house with no TV, no internet and nothing much to do except talk to my dad, attempt to cook, or read. My first two weeks in Ecuador I was on a farm in the middle of nowhere—no Internet, no TV, no radio, no cell reception and nothing to do after work except read and talk to the other volunteers. Now, I’m in a similar situation. It looks like I’ll be getting home around 4pm everyday, and while there are ample TVs here and internet cafés close by, there’s still not really anything to do in the Western sense of the term (no movie theaters, bowling alleys, bars, cultural attractions, etc.) Mostly, it seems like people play volleyball, watch TV and sit around and talk to each other.

Spending time in places like this has made me think about the nature of my friendships. With casual friends, I do many of the same things people seem to do in rural Ecuador. We watch movies together, sit around chatting about what we did today, maybe go shopping or grab a meal. With my closest friends, though, I mostly share ideas with them. Sure, we hang out and waste time together, but my closest friendships are the ones where we stay up until all hours of the night discussing Occupy Wall Street, the border and the socioeconomic factors which create food deserts. Mostly, we talk about the world—what’s going on, what’s wrong with everything and how we might go about fixing it.

In my ideal world, communities would be a lot more local than they are now. People would spend a lot more time interacting with their neighbors, a lot more time doing things like taking care of community gardens and a lot less time online. In some versions of the future, there is no internet—post-gridcrash, we all go back to being people living in the rural Third World, with no power, little connection to the outside world and a radically local lifestyle. This is how humans have lived for thousands of years, for the majority of human history. And it’s occurred to me that in this world, I have no idea what a friendship looks like. If the world were such that there weren’t absurd problems to try and solve, or if I was living so locally and off-grid that I had no idea what was going on on other continents, I have no idea what I would do with my friends.

In many ways, the Ghanaian villages I visited this summer and the Ecuadorian cloud forest where I’m living now seem like a window into this world. Here, people seem to form relationships based more on proximity than anything else. You know the people you grow up near, because they’re close to you. Obviously, there are people you get along with better than others, and you gravitate towards them. People aren’t disconnected from the outside world by any means—Intag is a hotbed of environmental activism on issues ranging from deforestation to water pollution caused by mining. But most people here don’t seem to spend their free time discussing the philisophical implications of Occupy Wall Street imbracing an explicitly nonviolent strategy, for example. They mostly spend it being normal people.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the end of civilization (or at least a transition to a radically localized economy) would look like in economic, political and environmental terms. I’ve thought a lot about big picture things, how we would get food and energy, how democracies would function. But it’s interesting to think about the more personal—not just that my friends might be very different people, but that the entire nature of friendship might change too. I always think of things like types of food or manners of greeting people when asked to describe cultural differences. It’s kind of an exciting notion that something as basic as friendship isn’t a constant either. 

Justified murder and the ethics of "the greater good"

Is it ever ok to kill another human being?

This is one of the oldest and trickiest moral questions in the universe. Most people will say that yes, under certain circumstances, the taking of human life is justified. The most common cases where people are willing to accept killing seem to be self-defense, war and the death penalty (this one seems to mostly apply to Americans). Some people will go further, and some people are opposed to any type of killing. But the vast majority of humans seem to recognize that under certain circumstances, the taking of human life might be the lesser of two evils.

Even in situations where we might personally feel uncomfortable justifying murder, most of us can sympathize with the motivations of murderers. In both high school and college, I had classes where we read Beloved. In the book, Sethe (an escaped slave) kills her infant daughter to keep her from being sent back into slavery when slavecatchers come looking for the family. Most of the students discussing the book felt that in the same situation, we probably wouldn’t have had the guts to kill our children. A few people said that Sethe’s actions were morally wrong. But almost everyone sympathized with her motivations. The popular author Jodi Picoult (author of My Sister’s Keeper, among other things) has written several books whose plot basically revolves around unusual murder cases—the husband who smothers his wife with a pillow because she’s dying of cancer and they both agree that it would be easier to have her die quickly at home than suffer first; the teenage couple so entwined that when Emily gets depressed and wants to end her life but doesn’t have the courage to do it, her boyfriend pulls the trigger for her because he can’t bear to see her suffer anymore. Dexter is a popular TV show which revolves around a man who can’t control his impulse to kill, so he channels it by killing other serial killers. The idea of “moral” murder runs deep in our popular culture.

To me, the ethics of murder get most interesting when you’re talking about preventing a greater wrong. Most people would agree that if we had a time machine, it would be a good idea to go back in time and shoot Hitler in the face. But beyond that, the ethics get more complicated. I want to be an activist, and I’m not inherently nonviolent in my ideology. I believe that violence is justified in defense of human rights when other nonviolent measures have been exhausted. This might sound like a radical statement in this day and age, but I think it’s really just a question of degrees. Ask almost any American today if they believe that slaves fighting back against their masters were justified in killing them, and you’ll get a yes. Ask the same question about indigenous people in the Amazon killing oil company representatives who refuse to leave and refuse to stop polluting their land and destroying their way of life, and you’ll get a much wider spectrum of answers. (I’m still undecided on this one, by the way.) I once read a book which addressed the age-old question of what you would do if you knew you only had a week to live. The woman writing said she had a friend who had a simple answer. She wouldn’t go base jumping or spend time with loved ones. She would hunt down the men who had raped the people she cared about, and she would kill them one by one. I can’t say I’d do the same, but at the same time, I can’t really argue with her motivation. I’ve never been raped, and to my knowledge, neither have any of my close friends. If I were in her position, though, I imagine I would feel similarly.

Like many people, I think moral rightness should trump legality. What I mean by that is that if there are laws which are clearly wrong or immoral, it’s an obligation for responsible citizens to oppose them. Most social change in the US has come about through this premise—slave revolts, lunch counter sit-ins, draft card burning, workers going on strike before it was legal. If the Keystone XL pipeline does get approved, I’m counting on other activists to join me in stopping its construction, by any means necessary. I believe that the importance of having a livable planet trumps any laws which guarantee property rights to people building the pipeline. Likewise, if Ecuador decides to open Yasuní National Park for oil extraction, I’m hoping that the communities that live there will fight back, both legally and literally, if necessary.

The morality-over-legality idea is what inspires many vigilante groups, as well as activists willing to use illegal tactics. It’s the reason the Minutemen are patrolling the US’s southern border to keep out illegal immigrants and, in some cases, poisoning water left out in the desert to keep people from dying of dehydration. It’s the reason the Animal Liberation Front is willing to bomb animal research labs and rescue animals from slaughterhouses. Usually, I’m inspired by actions like this. I respect the convictions of people who believe enough in what they’re doing that they’re willing to go to jail for their ideals, even if I don’t personally agree with their tactics. I’m inspired by the idea of being on the right side of history later even if you’re on the wrong side of the law now.

But there’s one increasingly common action being taken by activists in the US that makes it very hard for me to agree with the morality-over-legality idea. For people who engage in this action, it’s the only way they have to stop a much greater evil. They’re at the fringes of a large movement, and while many within that movement claim to renounce the violence of their tactics, many are also secretly grateful that some people are willing to stand behind their convictions.

I’m referring, of course, to the pro-life/anti-abortion activists who have murdered abortion providers. The most recent inductee into this crowd was Scott Roeder, who shot Dr. George Tiller in church in 2009. Dr. Tiller was one of three doctors in the United States who performed late-term, third trimester abortions, almost entirely to save women’s lives or because the fetuses had debilitating disorders which would cause them to die shortly after birth. Roeder was a long-time anti-abortion advocate, and he accomplished in one day what Operation Rescue and all the rest of the non-radical activists on his side hadn’t been able to do in thirty years of protest and lawsuits—he shut down Tiller’s clinic.

I can’t really argue with Roeder’s tactics. I don’t believe in any kind of eye-for-an-eye justice—I’m talking about murder as a tactic to prevent further loss of life in a literal, immediate sense. If you believe that abortion is wrongfully killing a human life, if you believe that it’s murder, and you know that the law isn’t on your side, you don’t have a lot of options. Decades of lobbying hasn’t made abortion illegal (though it hasn’t made it dramatically less accessible, especially to low-income women). And when you’re talking about murder, you don’t really want to stand around and wait for the state to do the right thing. You want to stop it by any means necessary. I partially understand this conviction, because I know that if abortion were illegal, I’d drop everything I was doing to go to medical school so I could set up a safe and illegal abortion clinic. That’s how strongly I feel about the importance of access to reproductive healthcare.

The pro-choice crowd wants people like Roeder to be classified as domestic terrorists, something the US government has been unwilling to do. Beyond their support for access to abortion, pro-choicers argue that part of living in a civil society is obeying its laws, whether you agree with them personally or not. Mostly, I think this premise is true. You don’t run red lights even if you want to, because you respect that other people need to get places in an orderly fashion too. You pay your taxes which go to fund all kinds of shit you don’t agree with (wars, abstinence-only education, executions, food stamps, the US Department of Education), regardless of your political affiliation. But when morality gets introduced into the equation, it gets harder to make this argument. Civil society, sure, but you don’t stand by while sentient beings are being murdered. You refuse to be drafted even if it means getting arrested, you break into labs to free monkeys being tortured, or you murder abortion providers to keep them from killing.

At the end of the day, my convictions that doing right should be our highest calling trump my belief in the importance of civil society. This puts me in an uncomfortable position with people like Roeder, because holding this position means saying that I don’t disagree with his tactics, only the beliefs that motivated them. One of the points of laws is that they represent societal norms. They protect all of us by not allowing one person to impose their view of morality on the rest of us, at least most of the time. But still, I can’t make the argument that following laws we know to be morally wrong is the right thing to do. Morality has always been and will always be subjective. There are often no easy answers. One person’s guerilla is another person’s freedom fighter, and one person’s domestic terrorist is another person’s moral crusader. And while I can hope that those who choose to take the law into their own hands share my conceptions of what is moral, I can’t really fault those who disagree with me for doing the same.