EDLM Diary Entry
1 October 2019
This morning upon waking I found it difficult to disengage myself from a vivid and involved dream (I like to say I get all my most important news from cryptic symbolism in my dreams; I wish it were true). In it, my wife and I drove to a theater in Indianapolis to see a film based on a speculative novel I recently read, Vincent and Alice and Alice by Shane Jones. The plot—a mildly dystopian confection concerning the use of virtual reality wish-fulfillment technology as a means of keeping office workers productive and distracted—isn’t terribly important to the dream (I’m sure you can google it or whatever you future people do to reference obscure information) because the movie didn’t follow the plot of the book, which my oneiric self found vexing at first. It became clear about midway through, though, that there were live-action elements to the film: real people emerging from real doors in the theater and joining the action, smells and sounds that were directly sensible. At some point I looked to my right to say something to my wife and found her gone. I assumed she’d gone to use the restroom or take a call (she had seemed completely uninterested in the film anyway), but then she appeared onstage, in costume. I stood up and walked to the stage to ask her what was going on, only to immediately join the action in the stage/filmic world. Soon the entire audience was part of the film’s fictional realm, exploring the sets and trying to figure out where they fit in. This soon devolved into the audience roaming freely about the film set, which became a vast museum, an endless succession of rooms, each of which was dedicated to examples of objects and settings in everyday life: a warehouse-sized gallery of clothing and accessories worn by early 21st-century youth, a dirigible-sized hangar full of lawn-care tools, a vast cavern of different home kitchens of every conceivable layout and level of appointment. The plot of the movie (which was not the plot of the novel) was completely erased; it had become merely a crowd browsing haphazardly through an equally haphazard Museum of Contemporary North American Quotidian Middle-Class Artifacts. And there was a lot of stuff there, most of it useless, inert, and somehow absurd. When I had fully awakened and remembered that it was an EDLM Diary day, I almost gasped at the metaphorical aptness. This is why I pay attention to my dreams.
As I walked the dog and read the top news stories on my device (the Amber Guyger trial, more rioting in Hong Kong on the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, more political posturings and ratf**k shenanigans relating to the seemingly-endless Presidential Abuses of Power and Impeachment Inquiry Season of Hell) I began to think of another novel I read recently, Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha. In this dystopian novel (we in 2019 love to entertain ourselves with fictional dystopias in order not to think about the real one), the current U.S. President broadcasts pep rallies for himself twice a week from a huge transparent zeppelin full of paying foreign dignitaries and corporate executives as he flies between New York, Washington, and Mar-a-Lago, until one day he provokes a nuclear war that unfolds and escalates slowly across the the globe until civilization is nearly destroyed. 50 years later, a newly-rebooted New York Times sends a reporter to a secret bunker in the desert where the final hours of the World Wide Web are stored, including the vast totality of social media reaction to the unfolding crisis and end of the world, of which she struggles to survey even the tiniest micro-fraction. [Spoiler alert: it’s the same smooth blend of irony, snark, overwrought emotion, agitprop and remixed memes as social media’s reaction to any major news event.] And this made me think that this diary project is predicated on shaky—if not altogether faulty—assumptions.
Doten’s book was my key to the first questionable premise. Why are we using a 20th-century (19th-century, really—arguably even 17th) mode of discourse to project our thoughts beyond the 21st? There are two possibilities open: either there exists intelligent life several generations from now with the technological ability and inclination to read this document, or there does not. In the first (and only pertinent) case, why then wouldn’t they study tranches of social media discourse and activity instead of these diaries? It’s a far larger and more broadly representative sample of voices than these log entries written by mostly middle-class white people with college educations and decent credit scores, living in a stagnant small city that’s no longer truly representative of the nation at large. the problem going forward is not too little information, but far, far too much. Ergo, I’m wasting my time here.
My dream led me to the other bad premise: if you have the technological ability and inclination to access the information ecosystem of 2019, what could it possibly teach you? It’s nothing more than innumerable vast rooms full of antique junk, toward which we feel misplaced nostalgia and affection (if you’ve studied the Internet circa 2019 you know this). But you cannot and should not care about it. If you are reading, congratulations and job well done! You’re doing so in spite of us. The only things we know how to teach you are bad faith and bad habits of mind, pathologies.
And so this is my final Everyday Life in Middletown diary entry. Goodbye, Reader of the Future—and good luck.