Unquiet Desperation

Ever since I got involved with Podiobooks.com, people have asked when they might see fiction from me hit the Interwebs. Today’s the day.

If you head over to The Secret Lair, you will find the first episode of a work of serialized fiction called Tricksters.  It’s based on a writing prompt from two years ago, when Kris and I were meeting each morning at a local coffee shop to write. The ideas implied by the original piece have been lurking around in my head since then, and as one of my big goals for the year is to work on my practice of writing, I decided to jump in with both feet.

I freely admit that this a novice effort: I’ve long talked about writing fiction, and like many people, I’ve gotten caught up in buying books, reading blogs, listening to podcasts…doing anything but the actual work. That ends now.

Please check out the story. I welcome your thoughts.

To say that 2009 was a year of many lessons for myself and my family is like the ocean is deep or that outer space is vast: the simple sentence doesn’t really capture the magnitude of the underlying intention. I’ve long held that there are parts of a person’s life that they will spend the rest of their days working to understand the changes wrought during that period. 2009 was one of those periods of time for me.

What I Learned In 2009

• It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there: Yes, Los Angeles. Everyone who knows me is sick to death about hearing about this by now, but it is worth marking the lesson learned. There were a number of good and bad things about the move to and from L.A.  We still miss the scenery, the weather, and the friends we made out there. I miss my team at Mahalo, and the challenge of the work at the company. I do not miss the long, long hours, the constant conflict between work and family time, watching my children struggle in a school system riddled with major problems, living in a shoebox, and watching cops chase armed felons through our housing complex.  This leads to the next point…
• Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home: Being back in Cleveland is a relief, a joy, and terribly  frustrating at the same time. We love being back with family and old friends. We love the familiar places, but with returning comes the familiar problems, the things we disliked enough to try moving to another city to escape. The entire family has felt it, and we’re working through dealing with them day by day.
• Thing that change you do not change others: We went to California as one group of people, we returned as another. We learned, we grew, we changed. But…for folks back in Cleveland, we were not gone all that long; how much could have happened?  Just because you change, don’t expect that others will understand or even recognize the changes.
• All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy: Not long ago, I ended nearly all of my personal projects. This was liberating. I’m able to concentrate on my family, and not on who needs what from me out there on the Interwebs. There’s no pressure to constantly be checking email, Twitter, message boards, etc to get ahead, make a name, swimming upstream ceaselessly. Projects are only worthwhile when you are passionate about them. After that, they’re just baggage. Best to leave them to the passionate people, and move on to new vistas.
• Disconnect: I ditched my G1 (Android Phone) this month and went back to a normal phone. I’ve stopped tweeting other than when I post a new entry on this blog. I read my email once every couple of days. Living offline is much more interesting and vibrant than constantly watching a screen, be it on a laptop, television, or cell phone. The reality is, none of you need to know every 140 character thought that enters my brain. I’m not promoting anything other than asking that you make time to be out of touch for a while this year. The “social” part of the current Internet vibe is more than a little creepy. There needs to be room for silence, isolation, contemplation, and introspection. No one needs to know where you are at all times. Relax. Cut yourself loose.
• They aren’t here to make your life better: Think about how much information Google and Facebook and other sites know about you. Google, for instance, knows what you are searching. If you have Gmail, they can read all your email. If you use Google Voice, they have your voice mail messages. If you are using Android, they know your contacts and their information, and depending on the apps you use, they can know where you are, where you’re going, what you are listening to, and who you talk to the most. Now…I admit I sound a little paranoid when I talk about this, but is it really a good thing for any business entity to know that much about you?  If it came out tomorrow that the government was keeping track of your calls, eavesdropping on your email, and monitoring your web searching habits, would you be pleased with it?  Why are we so trusting of a business, which has less oversight and less accountability that the government? The simple truth is this: a business is not providing services to be nice to you. It is not trying to help you. It is trying to find a way to make money for its shareholders. That’s the point of a business: making money — maximizing value.  Ask yourself, it if were suddenly in Google’s best interest to build a map of your life using the data they have and sell it to a third party, what would stop them?  Or, more interestingly, how comfortable would you be walking into a mall and having the billboard change and address you by name, because they could read the RFID in your ID or credit card, then hit a database service exposing data about your searching and buying habits, creating a custom message just for you?  Perhaps I’m just getting old, but I find that incredibly creepy, and since I take a dim view of marketers to begin with¹, I want no part of it. I’m opting out.
• In the silence, there is Truth: One of my favorite stories comes from the Old Testament of the Bible. From I Kings 19:11-12, when Elijah is looking for the Lord:
  

  And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still, small voice…

  After this tumultuous year, I have taken time away from everything. In that silence, I have found parts of myself I thought lost. That is what the New Year has brought me: the voice in the silence, reminding me than I am more than the code I write, more than the sites I create. There is that stillness in all of us, reminding us of the important things, giving us creative vision that spawn great passions, leading us to places we need to go to grow and develop as healthy human beings. I have spent the last decade chasing technology. The silence reminds of what I loved before the tech, before the storm of activity that carried me to where I am now. The silence shows me that now is the time to revisit these older things, to rekindle fires which once burned brightly.

Unlike past entries, I will not venture to say what the next year holds. The best that I can do right now is hold fast to what I have learned this past year, to make it part of myself, and then to move on, one step at a time.  Just like you, and just like the rest of the world.

I wish you a Happy New Year. May you find what you are looking for.

-Chris

1. How can you trust anyone whose job is to create a false need where none currently exists?  Isn’t that just…dishonest?  To convince people to buy thing they don’t need?[back]

value (noun): relative worth, merit, or importance: the value of a college education; the value of a queen in chess.

Looking back on the increase of digitally-available content in the last five years has caused me to reflect upon the concept of Value.

Debating the relative worth of anything is a tricky business: it is both subjective both on a personal level (the worth or importance of a friendship, a job, etc), and subjective on a societal level (the worth or importance of a book, a college education, etc).

What is the relative worth of a digital work?  What is the importance?   Does the fact that it is digital affect it’s value?  How does time figure into the equation? For instance, is Tee Morris’s Morevi or Scott Sigler’s Earthcore more valuable than Nathan Lowell’s Captain’s Share or J.C. Hutchins’ 7th Son: Deceit because the former are two of the first podcast novels?  Is NIN’s Ghosts albums more valuable than the CDs released before he went for releasing digital copies on the Internet?

How does obtaining digital works for free affect how we value the work?  For instance, is an album of songs that you purchase from iTunes as important to you as the albums you buy on CD or the free version you get direct from the artist?  Is the podiobook of Matt Selznick’s Brave Men Run as important to you as the hard copy you purchased?

Perhaps a more accurate way to measure the value of a digital work is to ask about the effect of loss. Which would trouble you more, the loss of Mur Lafferty’s podcasted or PDF version of Playing For Keeps, or the loss of the hard copy you bought?

Personal Value vs. Monetary Value

Digital content has zero material production cost, and because of that, it is possible to offer it for sale at a much lower cost than a physical production. Because it is digital, in general, you can also replace it easily, if not instantly. The same cannot be said for physical goods…even next-day shipping is not instant gratification for most Internet dwellers.

How does that instant gratification change the way we make purchases, and conversely, how does it change how we budget money? Do you, personally, have a budget for online, instant purchases? Or are digital products an impulse buy?  If so, what does that say about the product’s value to you?

Because we can purchase digital products instantly, and because they can be replaced easily, I think we value them less. The relative pain of replacing them if lost is so low that we do not think about the purchase critically in the terms of the relative value to us.  We function much more on the instinctual than the reasonable level when buying digital goods.  It can be summed up in two words. WANT. CLICK.

We have the potential to consume digital products like locusts consume crops.  And like the majority of impulse buys, the majority of those purchases (iPhone games, iTunes singles, etc) transition quickly from something shiny to kipple¹ in a matter of days, sometimes even hours.

Think back. What percentage of the digital content that you have downloaded have you kept? How much have you lost track of? How much do you back up, just in case of a hard drive crash?

Capitalism is, by it’s nature, driven by consumption. There is nothing wrong with that when we apply rational critical thinking to the process of purchasing an item. My question is: has the advent of digital content fundamentally changed they way we think about purchasing goods, and if so, is that change for the better?  Or, has this change made consumption a reflex, a non-thought? In both cases, what does that say about the bond we have with the content, what is it’s relative value to us when compared to a real-world physical product?

(Note:  I edited this post after the original release, due to a mistake…edits I had made did not take the first time for whatever reason. I apologize for any confusion this may cause.)

Responses to this post:

• Considering the Value of Digital Goods @ thecommandline.net
• Value, Worth, Merit and Intangible Goods @mattselznick.com

1. [coined by Philip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?]
   the collection of useless bits of trash we wallow in; all the paper and junk that is not recycled; decaying entropic trash[back]

Making grape jam is a simple process. Take two quarts of Concord grapes, wash them, mash them briefly, cook them on the stove for ten-fifteen minutes, strain off the juice, add six cups of sugar, boil to about ten more minutes. Ladle into jars, seal, and submerge them into a boiling water bath for fifteen minutes. Remove and let cool.

Buying grape jam is even easier. Run out to the store, deal with the crowds, find the brand of grape jam you want, wait in line, pay, walk out, drive home, and enjoy.

Cost-wise, it’s all about the same.  There’s no huge savings in doing it yourself.

So why bother to do it yourself? With making jam, or with anything else?

Satisfaction
When done well, the homemade jam tastes so much better than the stuff from the store. Part of this is physical and real: using fresher ingredients in a small setting, you can achieve  better results. The other part is psychological: you took the time and did it yourself with your own two hands.  There are few better feelings than knowing you have learned a new useful skill.

Do you remember being surprised or even amazed at all the things your grandparents or your parents knew how to do? How one or more of them know some trick or some way to handle a situation, be it home repair or cooking?  Where do you think those skills came from?  They came from learning how to do it themselves.

Passionate Experimentation
It is very convenient to be able to pick up whatever you want from the grocery whenever you want/need it. But the product is bland, it’s uniform, it’s designed to appeal to the most people it possibly can.  When you do it yourself, you can make adjustments for your own palate. Not satisfied with how Smucker’s jam tastes? You can work to improve upon it.  Maybe you want to try a flavor that you’ve never been able to find before, like a clove-spiced apple jelly. Once you know the basics, you can start to experiment and improvise. You can try new things, and the thrill of discovery is a wonderful feeling. Learn the simplest form, then write your own recipe.  Record it, pass it down.

When The Revolution Comes…
This is a joke between my wife and me. In the back of our minds, we’ve always wanted to know that if our lives were to change radically we would have the skills to pick up and carry on. It’s something that also plays off of seeking simplicity and eating real food, as well: when we make things ourselves, we know what’s going into them, and we know we can repeat the process however many times we like.  Knowing how things actually work is useful, whether you’re speaking of machinery, or ingredients in a recipe.  There are skills we use in business, then there are, in my opinion, Real World skills. Skills that you need to survive. I recommend learning a few of the latter.

At the end of the day, do you have actual, useful skills?  If you were lost, who would you want with you?  The guy who spends his weekends hiking, or the one who understands how to use social media to build trust networks?

The Concern and the Challenge
No generation in the history of the world has lived more in it’s mind the current one. We live our lives being spoon-fed stories via movies, television, the Internet. We play long and involved games sitting on our couches staring at illuminated screens. We flit, digesting information from RSS feeds to Twitter to NPR to Podcasts.  My great concern is that, in time,  we will live our lives in our minds — we will cease doing things in favor of watching and/or reading about things.

Creativity and passion are not something you can experience by observing, not something can get from an illuminated screen. Watching someone chop wood does not make it possible for you to swing an axe. The goal of doing it yourself is just that most simple of verbs: TO DO. Act. Create. Participate and engage in the world around you instead watching in fly by on someone else’s Twitterstream.

I challenge you to do something new this week. Cook a new meal, walk a new route, seek out a new experience. Find something beyond the words to occupy yourself. Embrace an experience. Do it yourself.

(Update: People have asked for more detail about the jam-making process itself. That’s coming in a mid-week article, complete with pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.)

It was seventy-seven degrees and sunny in Cleveland today, and though only a few trees are starting to turn, you can tell by the angle of the light and the scent in the air that autumn is here. It is young, true, but it’s there all the same, if you have eyes to recognize it. You know it because there will be a day like today in about a month. The light will look the same way, coming through the few clouds, but it will be fifteen to twenty degrees cooler, and the leaves will be coming into their full color.

I spent the day outdoors, helping my father-in-law clean out his woodshop, ridding it of all the old scrap wood. After unloading it all, we sat on their porch in a pair of amish adirondack chairs, sipping root beer and watching the bees working to get all the remaining goodness from my mother-in-law’s garden before it dies off.  I sat there, in the sunlight, just chatting away with him. Not about anything specific. Just resting and watching the world go by.

There is a lot of data in what happened to me today. I could sit, tell you all about it, go look up the exact weather, the barometric pressure, all the dry details. It would be factually true, and yet it would miss something. The soul of it would be gone. The thing that makes it an experience, and not just a recording, would be missing.

One of the comments I got from last week’s essay was from Matt Wilson. He said:

I grow vegetables in a small plot in my backyard for a lot of the same reasons. After work, getting my fingers dirty by doing some weeding reintroduces me to the real world.

I started to think about that phrase, The Real World.  It’s not the first time I’ve heard a person use it when separating their offline activities from their online activities.  I find it curious because so many of us spend so much time online these days. We enjoy it, revel in the information, the connectedness, the geekiness of some things, the banality of others. We swim through streams of data all day long. Email, podcasts, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.

And yet, how many of us feel that, for all the glory that is the data, there is something missing?  That it’s all virtual, that it’s removed from The Real World, somehow?

Curious.

How does this thinking affect basic human relationships?  I know, for my part, that I have met a great many people online, yet the ones I am closest to I go out of my way to seek out in a more sensory, or Real, manner. Phone calls, meeting at cons, meeting for lunch, etc. While, intellectually, I know the reailty of all the people out there, unless I make a connection with them beyond the bits and bytes, it is hard to cultivate a friendship with them. It can be a simple as a Skype call in real-time (there’s that word, REAL, again), but that small thing gives me something to relate to that email or chat or Twitter will never provide.

So, dear reader, I am curious to hear your side of things. Do you draw the distinction between the real world and virtual space?  How does it affect your relationships, your interactions, your daily routine? If you were to shut off the computer, how many of those relationships would survive, and why?