Rivers of connection
This is about connection.
I remember a time when a computer was only that: a machine that could perform computations. We plugged it into the wall, it took in electricity, a CRT monitor would buzz and crackle with static, and we always turned it off when we were done using it. We had a small array of colorful floppy discs, and I would slide the metal shield open and closed, revealing the tape-like disc inside, wondering how anything could be in there. I was mesmerized by text editors and two-bit paper plane video games. We had a Gateway machine that came in a big, white box with black cow splotches all over it.
Then, the Internet.
It dripped into our home like a leaky faucet. I remember mom or dad asking us to get offline so they could use the phone, and me waiting around patiently until they hung up so I could dial back into AOL and type in a few keywords.
This was when we were living in Marysville, Ohio. This was middle school. We were only there for about three years, but those years left an unspeakable mark on me. I saw pornography for the first time, Y2K came and went, the World Trade Center fell, and I found a lonely acoustic guitar in our basement. I don’t know if I could name the feeling I had of being on the Internet then, but looking back, it seems clear that it was alive. And like all things within a society prioritizing capital, the one thing that was for certain was velocity. It would only grow, expand, speed up.
I have just finished listening to Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, Is a River Alive?, and I was reminded of a vague thought I’ve been playing with for several years: we are water. Now that I have finished Robert’s book, I have no problem adopting some of his language: we are rivers.
I have always thought of the Internet as a net or a web of interconnected nodes. I mean, it’s in the name. Now I see it more like water, like flow. A river of our own making. Like other people my age, I can remember the wild, unbridled early days of the Internet. I do not want to suggest that this was pure or perfect, but it does seem that the flow of information through this body has been dammed.
Like the Los Angeles River, the river of the Internet has been cemented over and guided down specific paths designed by corporations that mean to control its power for themselves. The Internet, which flows into us more and more each day, is riddled with waste and pollutants.
Of course, this is a cynical view of the Internet and social media, and it is not the complete truth. There is so much good that has come from the Internet as a tool of connection. But my feeling towards the Internet and the seemingly inevitable acceleration of technological innovation is one of wariness. Especially now that I am on vacation from my office job and am not sitting at a desk responding to Slack pings and Teams calls, I feel a great sense of relief in the pit of my soul. There is something about our digital landscape that feels off.
I had breakfast this morning with Aleks and Alex, two dear friends who live just a ten-minute walk from where my son and I are staying in Venice, California. I see a black and grey calico cat leap up over their fence as I cross the street and open their gate. Their front door is open, as it usually is when they are home, and Aleks comes out holding the cat as I announce my presence, shutting the gate.
“This is Grey,” she says, holding the cat I saw, which clearly did not want to be held. “She’s a bit skittish.”
“First Orange, and now Grey,” I reply.
Aleks had taken in a white and orange cat several years ago. Or I should say, a cat had taken in Aleks. At first, Aleks would complain about the cat being a nuisance that she felt obligated to take care of.
“Just like all the men in my life,” she had probably said.
Orange passed away not long ago, and Aleks was heartbroken. She had come to really love that cat, so it was good seeing her with Grey. I like to think it knew to find her.
“We’re having Polish sandwiches,” she tells me. “Is that okay, or do you want something else? I am boiling eggs, so you could have a soft boil if you want.”
She is very accommodating.
“Whatever you were going to make is what I’ll have,” I tell her.
I sit in the living room with Grey. Alex is in the bedroom on the phone with his father.
Right, I think. Today is Father’s Day.
Aleks pops her head in from the kitchen.
“Do you want your bread warmed or toasted?” she asks. “You know, like really toasted, with a hard crust.”
I think for a minute and then say, “Just warmed is fine. Again, however, you were going to make it.”
“Good,” she said. “It was a test and a huge matter of debate in this house. No one should overtoast good bread.”
I laugh, and Grey sprawls out next to me, letting me pet her once or twice before getting up and roaming the apartment.
Aleks is a proper bully, and I mean that in the best sense. She is tall with wild, wavy hair, and she has a ferocity of spirit that I must assume only the Western Slavic people know. She is also incredibly loving, hospitable, and loyal.
She brings a plate, butter, and a knife, and hands them to me.
“Here, butter these,” she commands, handing me the items.
“I love a task,” I say and then quietly get to work.
“And happy Father’s Day,” Aleks adds.
Yes, I think again, Father’s Day.
My son is asleep on a couch just a ten-minute walk away. He will be asleep when I return later, and he is still asleep now as I write this.
Father’s Day. The phrase sits in my head again now. Right now, right now. A meaningless holiday, something to make sons who don’t call their fathers call their fathers for a few minutes once a year. If you’re not calling regularly, why stand on ceremony?
I remember a time when a computer was only a computer. The Internet is no longer dripping in through the telephone modem; it surges and gushes in through fiber optic cables and 5G cell towers. If we could see these frequencies, we would know our world is flooded.
Aleks plays Aldous Harding’s latest album, Train on the Island, on Spotify via a Bluetooth speaker. It opens with a rhythmic, low-frequency drum machine and a Wurlitzer. Aldous’s voice speaks on top in a style that feels vaguely reminiscent of Laurie Anderson, but with more of a singer-songwriter’s sensibility. I enjoy it and pull out my smartphone to identify it, pull up the album, and save it to my Spotify library.
Even here, music for making breakfast, we are swimming in the Internet. This data is being streamed to us from some data center that Spotify owns or pays for. I joined Alek’s “jam,” which means both of our Spotify profiles are sending listening data back. All of this is aggregated elsewhere, into some dark, subterranean pool, a watery reflection of… me. This is sold to data brokers and others to then, at best, sell me something, and, at worst, monitor and suppress me.
I feel cursed to think about technology in this way. Are we truly more connected?
An Englishman, a Pole, and an American sit down for breakfast and coffee on the front porch of a tiny studio apartment just off the beach in Venice, California. The temperature is just under seventy degrees Fahrenheit, and there is a gentle breeze. The sky is blue and cloudless. We talk about family and the difficulties of maintaining healthy relationships with them.
“She didn’t even reach out to me when Orange died,” Aleks said of her older sister. Her voice was fiery. “Though I did block her, so maybe she had. When you unblock someone, I thought you’d get a stream of all the messages you missed.”
Her voice softens. “You don’t.”
My son and I are in Los Angeles on vacation, but the main purpose of the trip is skateboarding. My son loves to skate, and Nashville is not a premier skate hub. I tell Alex this.
“You’re a good dad,” he says. “My dad never even threw a football with me. ‘I’m too old for that,’ he would say. I think when Phin gets older, he’ll truly see just how lucky he is.”
I thank him, and my heart aches. Yesterday evening, we were at Stoner Plaza Skatepark (yes, that is its official name) and a man called me “dad of the year” after I told him where we were from and what we were doing.
Wouldn’t any father do this?
We finish eating, and Aleks rushes off to help some friends. I give her an awkward hug, and she’s gone. I sit with Alex for a while, talking about the future and just how hard it is to live in this world. We are the lucky ones, though. We have jobs, roofs over our heads, and our biggest worries are where we are going to be in thirty-five years. What a luxury!
“I need to think about a business,” he said. “My work is a young man’s game, and a mortgage is thirty-five years. I won’t have this job when I’m sixty.”
Alex tells me about a property they were looking at in Ojai.
“It was forty acres with a cheaply built house on it, but the price was really good,” he said. “We were thinking you could do glamping out there or yoga retreats or something. So what’s the catch? The soil would crumble in my hands, and the plant life was brittle. It felt… dead, and something about the place just seemed…”
He paused, uncertain whether or not to say it.
“…wrong? Like something terrible had happened in that place, something bad. Do you ever feel this way?”
A firework show of connections was going off in my head. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and scream, “Yes! Of course! Places speak! I feel this all the time!” But instead, I simply nod and say, “I do.”
Our bodies are a landscape. We are rivers. The Internet surges into us. Is it mostly poison, polluted runoff from the corporate damming of our souls?
I help Alex bring the dishes into the house, embrace him one more time, and then leave.
As I walk back up Brooks Avenue to my son, who will still be asleep when I get there, I am moved. I feel tears begin to form and then pass.
I truly love them, Aleks and Alex. I have for a long time, but this morning, a realization entered my dense skull: They are family.
It is not easy to grieve this place, and I am not sure if it is truly the place I am grieving. My son has asked me several times on this trip to move back, to move back now, but I know that’s impossible. Or at least it feels that way.
I am circling a beast. It is a dark shadow slinking through an endless cedar forest. It is a dark cap above a vast plain, a thunderhead pregnant with rain, wind, and electricity. It reaches out with vague, misty tendrils, out from the depths of the forest, out from the dark capped sky.
I see a young man carved from marble, shirtless. He wrestles with the beast, holding a shield to the sky and thrusting a spear into the woods. I watch from a rocky ledge, frozen.
Is this beast a demon or a god? I am afraid I will never get an answer to this question. I must commit. Fell this demon, or join this god.
I rush down from the cliff, weaving through the dark mists, dodging claws and lightning, my bow in my hand. I reach the man of marble, standing at his right side.
“Tell me what to do,” I whisper. “I am ready.”