Frozen Toothpaste

I have today two different pieces  essentially covering the same ground from slightly different angles. I was too attached to each to delete it and unable to figure out a way and to combine them, so you’re getting two for the price of one this 15th. The companion to this is “An Overwrought Historical Analogy about the Future of Writing”. I won’t be offended if you don’t read both.

Having just finished the fifth season of the The Wire, in which the show’s creator’s dissatisfaction with the present state of newspapers shines through, their future has been on my mind. And while David Simon appears to think that the medium’s primary problem is soulless corporations strangling their ability to chase a story while they desperately try to be profitable, his case if hardly convincing.

His Baltimore Sun newsroom has an ever-present crowd of people who don’t appear to be doing, well, much of anything. The fact that all these people are drawing a paycheck without pounding the pavement in any capacity seems as good an argument against the medium as it could be for it. One of the greatest contribution that this crowd of non-reporters seems to make is when they memorably inform a young reporter that unless 500 people have just emptied their bowels, they can’t really be said to have been evacuated. A funny bit, perhaps, but a meaningful contribution to Baltimore’s understanding of itself? Not so much.

The primary sin of former newspaperman like Simon is to know the way news and opinion have been gathered for the last 150 years and confuse that with the best way to gather it. Surely there are virtues of the method he shows; one of the men sitting in the Sun’s newsroom not reporting much of anything notices a reporter’s blatant and harmful dishonesty. There is undeniably a sort of rigorous peer-review that grows out of close working and competition in a newsroom. But, in Simon’s telling, the lying reporter is never publicly revealed. He wins a Pulitzer instead.

Do you remember pamphlets? The primary method of political debate and reporting for the 150 years before newspapers took over that role? Just the same, we shouldn’t be shocked if people in 150 years no newspapers as nothing more than a historical curiosity.

To protest the fall of newspapers (and magazines) as a hazard for comprehension of the world and its foibles is to conflate the medium with the message and the method with the result. The fact that we’ve grown used to the medium of newspapers (or magazines, or books) doesn’t mean that those media were the best for delivering the content they contain. And it certainly doesn’t mean that all their odd characteristic are integral to their job.

Consider Wikileaks, which has, by publishing bare documents leaked to it by dissidents around the world, broken nearly as many stories per year as a newspaper staffed with 30 times the people. Previously it may have been the case that such dissidents had to hunt down a newspaper reporter and hand off their controversial evidence; today, with a scanner and an email the whole world can see what you wanted to make public.

I’m not saying that Wikileaks is purely commendable or the future of reporting, but it is a distinct model that has a real potential to be different, and in certain ways better, than the media that people are so loudly worrying about the decline of. One of it’s biggest advantages is efficiency: Wikileaks only “publishes” when it has new news, and then only in the quantity of copies requested. Compared to massive inefficiency inherent in the newspaper model, this is definitely a more future-friendly way of working.

One can easily imagine newspapers being replaced by reporting collectives. Rather than existing in a framework of publishers and editors and subscription servicers, reporters wanting to discover and share the reality of their city could simply get together, uncover the details, and their publish peer-reviewed articles on the internet. I’m not the first person to envision such a thing (I think I got it from Jesse Darland), but I don’t think that means anything about it’s potential transformative power.

Lone-wolf self-publishing, essentially what I do here, is equivalent, only a reporter/writer need only worry about covering their own costs. Surly some would worry about the lack of someone looking over the writer’s shoulder, but the internet’s shown itself to be  the best medium ever invented for calling people on bullshit.

Surely there are problems with each of the three models I’ve suggested. And surely someone at some newspaper has already come up with laundry list of issues they foresee. But their model has never been perfect, and in an era of constantly falling advertising revenues and a wealth of new available publishing paradigms, the inefficiencies that have always been a part of their model are simply unsustainable.

I have today two different pieces  essentially covering the same ground from slightly different angles. I was too attached to each to delete it and unable to figure out a way and to combine them, so you’re getting two for the price of one this 15th. The companion to this is “’The Wire’ and the Future of Reporting”. I won’t be offended if you don’t read both.

Like no time in recent memory, the empire that has provided a comfortable existence to most writers seems near collapse. While (permitting for heretofore unprecedented agility) it may still be spared, the cracks and craters in the empire’s once grand facades are unmistakable. Like Rome before it, this is not an empire done in by another. It is rather a mix of seemingly minor causes that over time have left the empire’s negligent rulers unable to even dream of a means of saving that which crumbles.

As in the declining Rome, the barbarians on the periphery strike constant small but damaging blows to the empire. It started when Vinny the Jets fan (Oblique Elton John reference? Check!)  made a few of his fellow Jets fans a little less dependent on the local newspaper, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated for their football fix. Then the computing press was slowly marginalized by a chorus of amateurs who found each other more interesting than brands like PC Magazine and EGM. Today, some of the best magazine-length feature stories are published outside of the conventional magazine; Maciej Ceglowski’s excellent essay about how the cure to scurvy was known and lost (on Link Banana) leaps immediately to mind.

In another historical parallel, the barbarians on the periphery have led to hesitancy and poor decision-making in the seat of power. Unsure how to keep their power, they leap at every possible solution, while not exerting the effort or having the power to really execute any of them. They seek, rather than their continued relevance, their continued existence. Sacrificing what value they used to provide for the sake of getting the most out of what they have. And so once revered newsmagazines cow to base desires of reader, the purveyors of cheap and accurate information lock it away in the hopes that they can live off the small flow of people willing to pay for access.

This rough outline I’ve just embellished is unlikely to be new to anyone reading a thing I’m writing on this obscure outpost of the internet. In fact, few things more clearly demonstrate the problems of the once-great publishing empire than that anyone is reading this at all.

There was a  time not long ago, that all (beyond personal correspondence) that was read was sanctioned under the auspices of some part of the publishing empire. Now, as Clay Shirky most potently points out, we live in an age where everybody can easily write for everyone else. An age in which quite possibly the most-read thing in the world has been made exclusively by the people reading it. An independent self-sustaining enclave has no need for support from a distant empire.

And so we’ve entered the age of the doomsday prophets, who tell us these are the end times of objectivity and truth and sound reason. Many of these prophets work for the empire itself, hoping to make us see the value for the decrepit empire they control, whose passing would go unnoticed but for their regularly reminding how much we’ll miss them.

The crumbling of the publishing empire is a questionable blessing. Without any similar monolith rising to supplant it, it’s pieces will likely live for some time in a weakened state before being lost entirely. The real question is, does the passing of the print publishing empire mean the sun setting on what was good in it? Are we, to finish the historical analogy, entering the Dark Ages? Or as historians would correct us, a Medieval period, which isn’t nearly so dark as we were led to believe?

Surely, the recognizable superstructure is leaving. But the serfs (they’re meant to be writers in this thin and troubled analogy) toil on, their task little changed from the days of empire. What is to be the fate of these functionaries of the empire? Are writers to have a increasingly comfortable and independent life, or will they be crushed under the capricious will of the local knights?

It will likely be harder, in the coming age, for one to live a nice life only on the transforming of ideas into words. With so many people willing and able to be seen doing that thing, it’s unlikely to be as lucrative as it previously had the potential to be. But there’s probably still an opening for the really great ones to rise and become wealthy. And those who transform themselves into tradesmen, specializing and honing a specific ability, will probably make out OK.

But perhaps, as never existed among feudal serfs (because really, this analogy is more than a little broken), a network of reader-supported media can grow. Writers doing work better than a publisher ever got because they’re supported directly by people who want them to pursue their particular vision. Freed from what middlemen think the market will support, greater truth and beauty could prevail. And if there’s one future I get to choose, I’ll make it this one.

It’s often bandied about that optimism — no, pessimism — no, optimism is the key to being happy. I don’t think either, in the way we commonly understand them, has the potential to be the answer. Both require a unique flavor of delusion to do full time, and all delusion is detrimental.

“Detached openness” is a phrase I invented (or encountered, one can never be certain about such things) a few years ago. It is a shorthand of the disposition I thought (and think) ideal for moving through the world and being happy doing so.

While that alone may be enough for your understanding, let me clarify my understanding of these two words, as the standard definition of each is unlikely to illuminate what I think I mean.

Detachment, Buddhists caution, should not be mistaken for the ideal of non-attachment. While there’s certainly wisdom in that distinction, my understanding of detachment isn’t so narrow. The quickest way to differentiate the cautioned against detachment and what I mean by detachment seems to be these quotes from the Wikipedia pages for emotional detachment and detachment respectively.

[Emotional detachment] refers to an “inability to connect” with others emotionally, as well as a means of dealing with anxiety by preventing certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as “emotional numbing” or dissociation, depersonalization or in its chronic form depersonalization disorder.

Detachment, also expressed as non-attachment, is a state in which a person overcomes his or her attachment to desire for things, people or concepts of the world and thus attains a heightened perspective.

This proper understanding of detachment means knowing that not getting that promotion will not be the end of you. Exercised more strongly, it means knowing that the success or failure in this promotion process should in no way affect your self-worth or career objectives. At best, it means never even entertaining any of those thoughts. In this situation, one should understand the lower form of detachment as refusing to even try to get the promotion for fear of all the mentioned turmoil.

Openness here is understood as not dissimilar from optimism. It is being open to the possibility contained in every minute and seeing the good that can come out of seemingly bad things. It consists in being able to see the beauty in a piece of trash, the possibility in everything. I reach here for a quotation from Henry Miller:

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or as heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

I fail to see much with which I can supplement that.

The combination of these may be clear to you, but some illumination: detached openness recognizes the beauty in a sunset without striving to make it last in any way. It recognizes that the uncapturable ephemeral should not be held onto jealously or regretted when gone. Neither of those actions it helpful to your current mental health, nor do they enhance what was.

Ideally, we do this with all thing. We strive to see what good is unfolding without seeking to shape or change what we cannot. When something changes over which we have no control, we recognize it and seek to find good in the new order of thing. When something doesn’t change that we want to, we reassess and accept the unchanged situation without getting emotional. (Yes, I did basically steal this from the Serenity Prayer.)

I would make clear that I am no master of this disposition. I am prone to practicing the inferior form of detachment. I regularly find things ugly or infuriating or just plain bad. And I’m not always able to practice detached openness when attempting to correct these flaws.

Nor is this the only thing one needs. Other things certainly matter in life beyond your basic disposition to the world. Staying present for what is happening, to choose just one example, can get you at least as far.

But I feel rather certain that this disposition is the most healthy and useful one I’ve encountered in my life. Beyond pessimism or optimism, I believe detached openness is the secret to what mental balance I have and what happiness I find.