When Did The Nuts Take Over The Nut House: Thoughts and Observations on Contemporary Life

I‘m envious of Oliver Sacks’ ability to convey, in a sympathetic and non-judgmental manner, the inner life of the neurologically impaired. They are not portrayed as being insane. Their words and actions are not judged as being right or wrong. What they say and do are manifestations of the varying ways that the human brain shapes who we are and how we interact with the world. Sometimes I can be like Sacks, interacting sanely with the insane. But this is often short-lived. As I try to understand their world as they see it, I find that their insanity seeps into my brain. To preserve my sanity, I’ve created a mental safe haven. I’ve stopped reading the columns of Ross Douthat and David Brooks. I did not watch the Republican Triumph of the Will. I’ve ignored most of the Romney campaign and, on a very personal level, I unfriended or blocked several people on Facebook. None of this has stopped the insane from pounding on the gates, nor has it stripped them of their power. However, it has sharply reduced their ability to make me insane so, in that respect, I’ve reduced their power over me. In like fashion I have avoided the circus known as the Democratic National Convention. I’ve read no more than a few paragraphs about the event and I have not watched any video clips.

I’ve also taken a break from Facebook. I sneak in for a few minutes and quickly get out. I’m trying to understand Facebook from the outside by seeing it as an outsider. After I accidentally stopped watching television over thirty years ago — accidental because it wasn’t an intentional act — if and when I watch television (always at someone else’s house or when we are on vacation because, at home, we do not have cable television), the flow and rhythms of the television become painfully obvious. It’s like a choreographed metronome whose beat changes, dragging your emotions along with its perpetual motion. Imagine, for a moment, that you had to describe a television to a stranger. You might describe it as a box or a panel on your wall. This box shows pictures one at a time, accompanied with sound. The pictures and sound move quickly, creating the illusion that you are watching real people in motion. (Well, you are watching real people but it’s an image of real people. The people are not inside the box, despite Mr. Wonka’s invention.) If I then had to describe Facebook, I would say it is a peculiar sort of television. The “pictures” may be words or a digital image or some combination of the two. Some of those words or images may have a “link” which is a device that allows you to go from one image to a completely different image. I’d explain how the images are stacked one above the other, allowing you to see five, six or more of them at one time. After I got the nod of understanding, I’d then explain how the vertical images on Facebook move all by themselves, then suddenly stop, then start moving again. New images appear at the top, pushing the others down. This goes on and on and on as everybody adds their own images and, since everyone wants their image to be seen, they add the same or similar image, again and again, day in and day out.

After hearing this description, the stranger may come to the same conclusion that I’ve come to: Facebook is a form of insanity. There is no narrative framework to tie everything together. There is no end point or goal. It is a visual perpetual motion machine that, at the end, creates nothing of lasting value. While it does make it possible for some people to get to know one another, unless one leaves Facebook and exchanges emails or phone calls, it is rare — though not impossible — for the “knowing” to get beyond the superficial. When it does go into some depth, when you do get to know others beyond the superficial within Facebook, it is done “off to the side” in some exchange of comments that is part of that endless stream but not completely a part of it, since only the end of the “conversation” appears in the ever-moving vertical stream. If you come to the side conversation a bit late, or you only see the last few parts of the conversation streaming by, you may not understand what was really taking place.

While looking through a collection of photos about child labor in America, I was struck by the photo of a family sitting in a room sewing garments. I’ve seen many photos like this but this time there was an eery familiarity to it, a déjà vu-type experience.

In 1998 I freed myself from the burdens of a steady paycheck and retirement benefits so that I could be an entrepreneur, a French word that means “to enter poverty.” It was a great two years. Then the Internet bubble burst and business took a nosedive. Then business became even worse after 9/11. Then business picked up a bit but took another nosedive by 2007. I closed down my business, got a regular job, but was liberated — by my employer — in 2009. Throughout my ten or so years of being an entrepreneur in the technology field, I’ve done many fixed-cost projects which, to some degree, is not all that different from what the family in the picture is doing except they called it piece work. In either case, you are paid a fixed amount for whatever you produce: a garment; a website.

After I closed my office in 2000 (post-Internet Bubble bursting), I set up a home office in one corner of my living room. If you were to peek in through the living room window, you would see my family engaged in “modern” piece work. After putting in eight or ten hours at her job, my wife would be typing on her laptop, working on the never-ending paperwork — now “digitized and online” — that she’s required to do. My older daughter would be staring at her laptop, reading online material for a college course while my younger one would be typing a paper for her college course. If you looked for me, you would only see my back as my focus would be solely on my computer screen. (At around age six, my younger daughter gave me a home-made Father’s Day card. On the cover was a picture of me sitting at my computer. All you could see was the top of my head and my back.) In some strange way we are that family doing “piece work” and “homework.” Of course we have more comfortable surroundings. We have air conditioning and a flat-screen streaming NetFlix movies. But all of us toil away 50, 60, 70 hours or more. There is no separation of work and family.