A nice editorial (“The Land Where the Internet Ends”) in the New York Times the other day, not least because I was so taken aback that I had no idea its subject existed.
The author visits an enormous radio telescope array in West Virginia (telling named after the late Senator Byrd) whose extraordinary sensitivity demands that people in the area – read, about 12,000 square miles – do without cell phones, microwaves, and other electromagnetic-emitting devices that could mess with the instruments. This creates, in essence, an oasis of late 20th-century technology. Oasis is a loaded word, of course, and there’s more to say here, but it’s amazing to me that such a substantial area can exist in the “desert” of internet- and information-filled human habitation. Such an unexpected haven is surely an oasis of sorts.
The article contains wonderful images as well – the photographer won the Pulitzer Prize a decade ago. Perhaps it is appropriate most of the man-made structures in the images, beyond the vast mechanism of the radio telescope, are ramshackle barns right out of a movie, the very picture of quiet, pastoral, left-behind Appalachia. The people the author speaks with and describes seem similarly out of central casting – so much character that they seem fictional. The man who suffered a brain aneurysm. The cell phone-less elder locked out of many modern activities. The young woman who fled modern society and speaks of the rightness of her new life, but also how 80% of people couldn’t handle it.
It puts me in mind of Robert Caro’s ongoing biography of LBJ. There was a wonderful and powerful anecdote as to why he was so compelling to the people of Texas. “He brought the lights.” Electricity coming to desolate areas empty of people, places, and things, simply having light and connection to the outside were enough to win him loyalty. Would the internet win similar loyalty today? We hear of billionaires’ philanthropic (but frequently wealth-creating) efforts to launch satellites to beam internet to the poorest parts of the world. And yet I can’t believe Mark Zuckerberg would be similarly lionized by the inhabitants of, say, the Indian hinterlands. There’s something active about the internet compared to the passiveness of electricity or phone lines. Engaging with it is engaging with the work of other people, with portals made by them for you, to engage on their terms and no say of your own. Electricity is selfish. I power what I want, when I want. It’s binary, not some incredible multidimensional spectrum. Physics, not society.
I enjoyed the author’s description of the physical differences she noticed, feeling that people stood strangely alert before realizing they simply lacked the smartphone hunch. That there was a shared physiological difference emphasized the feeling that she had truly entered some kind of lost world peopled by beings similar to but not the same as us, a lost colony of homo sapiens who had missed the last three decades, which feels like it might as well be three millenia. As much pleasure as her descriptions of this lost world gave me – not much different, in its way, than the yearnings many city-dwellers feel for an idealized West, wild country they have never experienced and probably never will but serves as a nice mental escape – I wondered if there was much substance to it. Is it that different from a piece one could write thirty years ago? Instead of no internet, it might be a part of the country still without electricity or untouched by modern roads. Thirty years before that, a town without cars. Before that, the telegraph, and so on, and so on.
Recall the stories of James Herriot, writing accounts of being a veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales in the decades immediately proceeding and following World War II. He describes at one point coming on a house lonely even by the standards of that lightly-populated stretch of country, and peers into the window to find his erstwhile clients sitting on a wooden bench in silence, feet to the fire. He is amazed, then realizes that this is what it must have been like not so long ago – no “wireless,” no electricity, just the glow of a fire and the presence of family. To a 21st century reader, Herriot’s own life is already quaint, so this might as well be a window into the time of Dickens. But that’s the whole point. We think in terms of great swatches of history, but surely every generation has this tipping point where the advances of the past thirty years – or whatever time period you like – collectively become enough to feel as though a page has turned. Am I just the latest in a long line? There was, no doubt, someone who would have peered through that window alongside James Herriot and thought some measure of what they saw was good, was better, more desirable than the current state of the world. But those a hundred years later can only laugh; it’s not even a question when you’d choose to live, and while a wood-burning fireplace is a wonderful amenity, not much of that lifestyle seems worth holding up as an ideal.
If I’m just experiencing the same thing that parts of every previous generation have experienced – a yearning for parts of the past we didn’t know to value, a discomfort with the pace of change, a feeling that something seems off even if we don’t have a good comparison for what would be right – how should I read this article? Is it proof that, to an extent, we can always take the path of the stylites and retreat from the “sins” of this world? Or that the best we can hope for by taking that path is to have a small community of fellow oddballs who become an interesting long read, but at best a small footnote in history? Alas, I suspect it’s the latter. But then again, sometimes the Buddha comes down from the mountain and the people find value in the message, so perhaps the lesson is to, as the French say, reculer pour mieux sauter.
Now, how to leap?
smq.world 