The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (22 page)

A week into that staring, I went against my better judgment and made another online date: this time with a guy called Kenny. Under “Likes” he had listed:
This American Life;
Animation; Climbing. I like those things, too. But by then I had learned to expect that the person I was about to meet had little to do with the avatar I’d made a date with.

We settled on beers at a swank place in Vancouver’s Gastown. “Your photos were dark,” said Kenny as I sat down. This shocked me because I hadn’t considered that others might feel fooled when they met me; somehow, I never thought of my own online persona as a ploy. I could see the man before me adjusting his idea of “Michael” into a breathing, broken creature. Meeting an online acquaintance in person is always an exercise in disillusionment. (Perhaps the photo is old or softly lit; perhaps the baseball cap strategically covers a balding head.) In old-fashioned meetings, you never have the opportunity to indulge in idealized visions of the person until you form them yourself, in a love-addled haze.

Kenny and I, anyhow, chatted over a flight of European brews and a couple of soft artisanal pretzels. About what, I’ve no recollection. My only distinct memories are: his comment about my pictures; the moment he got up and asked to switch seats so he could make sure some homeless guys didn’t steal his bike; the pressure of his hand on my shoulder as we shimmied past each other around the table. And later, out on the darkening sidewalk, a hit of soap and shampoo as we went in for a hug (no kiss) good-bye.

The American media adviser Lyman Bryson told us that technology is always about explicitness. Technologies—and online technologies especially, I think—focus our attention on one cramped view of things. They cut away the “haptic” symphony of senses and perceptions that make up real, lived interaction. The smell of fresh soap, say.
Marshall McLuhan, in
The Gutenberg Galaxy
,
writes about the garden of senses
that we gave up in order to focus on the purely visual business of reading. Maybe we lived a long time in that garden once. Now we trip into it only on occasion, as though it were a strange gift and not the ordinary, real world. There was that brief, heart-thrumming moment with Kenny on the street, though, when I felt something hopeful start up.

Like my entire generation, I seem to be drawn toward the Internet’s fluttering promise of connections, and then repulsed by it, in equal measure. And I feel that, in the end, the Internet will win. On my solo walk home—after I left the man I now call my partner—I might have enjoyed the chance to reflect on his charms or run our conversation over again in my head, committing to memory his favorite beer, the color of his eyes. Instead, I clutched the phone in my pocket, hoping for any slight vibration.

• • • • •

Two Years Later . . .

Since the day Kenny and I met on that simple evening down in Gastown, the world has carried on, churning out newer and faster ways to connect (or feel connected). I am equal parts amazed and disheartened by the yenta services that have come along. One enterprising company sent me a press release announcing a site called Qpid.me, which helps users test relationship waters by sharing verified STD results. Meanwhile, an app has been released in Iceland that allows users to bump phones and check whether or not they’re cousins before having sex (Iceland, we are to understand, suffers from a particularly redundant gene pool). I cannot disparage the utility or good intentions behind such efforts. But I can grouse.

As for me and my man, we are now beyond any online help, it seems, enmeshed as we are in the soft machinations of domestic life. The cleverest innovation
we
employ is the concept of “date night,” our standing Thursday evening engagement, when the obligations of friends and families are put on hold and we content ourselves with games of Scrabble and walks through the tony neighborhood up the hill where we like to judge the mansions. There’s something disheartening about having to schedule “dates” in this way, but the alternative appears to be no romance at all—leave a vacuum unguarded and life fills it with cocktail events you didn’t need to be at and episodes of
Veep
.

Date night was instigated after ten months of laughter and fights, when we decided to move in together. We found a place in a 1930s brick walk-up, not too far from the homes of our siblings. Ours is a one-thousand-square-foot apartment with a sizable living room where we both said we could get some real work done: He would draw and I would write. The light was good, the floors were hardwood; we could see a line of smoke blue mountains from the window—past the parking lot and through the crisscross of telephone wires.

For a desk, we lugged home a nine-foot-long kitchen countertop made of solid oak, to which we bolted a set of $10 IKEA desk legs. Monday to Friday we sit alongside each other at this desk (I’m there now). A squat table lamp in the middle quietly marks the boundary between his zone and mine.

So I sit here typing and Kenny sits there sketching. We’re not supposed to talk when we’re at work (at the desk). We’re alone together. We take silent turns filling the teapot and will take breaks to play stupid games we’ve made up or to walk around the block. But mainly we’re sitting here pretending to be alone. I look over occasionally, to be sure of him.

• • • • •

What was it that brought us together, exactly? An algorithm chugging along on some server, yes. But what beyond that? I want to know what the brain behind PlentyofFish looks like.

And so, one not so important day in August, I ride an elevator twenty-four stories up to the company’s spanking-new headquarters. Seventy-four staff members rotate through these rooms, young folk mostly, in T-shirts and jeans, lined up at long rows of computers. In the cafeteria, baskets of snacks are on offer. I’m ushered into a meeting room called “the Elgin Sea,” where I wait for CEO and founder Markus Frind.

When Frind arrives, he’s roughly what one would expect: a computer geek’s physique, bolstered by the quiet confidence of someone who made more money this morning than you will all year.

Frind was crafting virtual tours of real estate developments when, in his off hours, he wrote the PlentyofFish code out of his living room. There was no way of monetizing the site at first, but it seemed a good way to learn some programming skills; he threw the switch on his dating site after two weeks of work.

A few months later, the site was pulling in $1,000 a month in advertising revenue. “I thought, Wow,” Frind tells me (though he’s not giving me a wow-face). “About eight months after launching it, I was making
three
grand a month and I quit my day job. I didn’t hire anyone else, though, until four years later. By that point I was making ten million a year.”

The reticence to hire may be explained by the fierce competition of those early days. “There were hundreds of dating companies coming online back then. But now, you know, we can’t steal market share from competitors anymore, ’cause there’s no one else to kill.”

I tell Frind that his Web site brought my partner and me together, thinking he might smile; but he’s heard this before. Maybe a few million times. “So how exactly did your software decide to put my picture in front of Kenny’s eyes, and vice versa?”

Frind refers to the system as a “black box”—meaning he’s not always aware himself of the choices his software is making. But the math comes down to shared interests. If two people share qualities that other successful couples have shared, then PlentyofFish’s algorithm will assume you should check each other out. I field the old idea that opposites attract, and Frind says, “Yeah, opposites attract and then they attack. We’ve found that if you share interests, you’re twice as likely to stay together.”

And most shared interests, he tells me, boil down to a similarity in disposable income. “Income tells us everything,” Frind says. “There’s a lot of matching that’s based on income. And education, too, but that’s a proxy for income. I mean, you’re not going to match a doctor with a carpenter; we know that if you have a PhD, you won’t date someone without a high school diploma.”

“Sounds harsh.”

“Yeah, but we model on what actually happens. People don’t like to hear it, but this is the way the world works.”

Other matchmaking decisions are equally strident. “If you’re a guy, you’re never going to see a girl that’s taller than you,” says Frind. (He gestures at me and says, “But for gay people we drop that criterion.”) Also, men looking to be in touch with women more than fourteen years their junior, or men who use graphic language in their messages, will find their communications blocked. “I looked at a bunch of metrics and was wondering how we could get more people dating online. We saw there was a small group of men just looking to hook up, and the theory was these men were making women leave.” (
PlentyofFish is especially solicitous
of its women, since they make up only 40 percent of their user base.)

By the time we shook hands, I saw Frind as a friendly, businesslike man who captains a ruthless, brilliant, and efficient service. And I saw it was actually up to individuals, then, to draw something meaningful or romantic from the vagaries of Frind’s teeming crowd. From a mass of sixty million, draw one person to love. And then, against all odds, make it work. It was more than a little unsettling to see that such a calculated and crowdsourced system had brought us together in the first place.

Ah, where have they gone
, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?

—Milan Kundera,
Slowness

FROM
the driveway, Douglas Coupland’s house doesn’t look as if it belongs to a person interested in the future. He lives at the foot of a wooded cul-de-sac, on the side of a big green hill, just a couple of blocks from the house where I grew up. His gravel driveway is shrouded by banks of bamboo, and the house itself—midcentury design—is edged with schools of handmade pottery, the kinds of pieces that friends bring back from trips to the Gulf Islands. I’ve come here to talk about absence with Coupland because he strikes me as a writer who knows how to live well in the digital world. His books—from
Generation X
to
Microserfs
to
jPod
—deliver portraits of contemporary souls both adrift in their tech-addled world and discovering new meanings, new interpersonal revelations that sometimes reach a comforting, even religious, tenor.

Coffee in the living room. A wall has been bolted over with plastic toy parts so it looks like a motherboard designed to process the zeitgeist. Coupland (fifty-one, with the white and swept-back hair of a medieval herbalist) is searching the room for an answer. I’ve just asked: “When was the last time you went a day without the Internet?”

“A decade ago,” he says at last. “My IT guy screwed up and I was offline for two days in London. But other than that I’ve been online every day since the nineties.”

“You never go offline on purpose?”

Sip of coffee; mini grimace. “I’d go crazy. You remember when Wikipedia had its one-day blackout? It totally crimped my lifestyle.” This surprises me, maybe disappoints me a little. Maybe I thought Coupland would tell me that the secret to writing a dozen international best sellers was that he did e-mail only once a week. . . .

He continues: “There have been these little milestones over the years—when I canceled the newspaper, when I started cooking with the Internet, these little things that tell you your brain’s been colonized.” It’s a colonization Coupland likes, though. He Googles about one hundred times a day, and at the moment, he’s wearing a black bracelet that tracks his sleep patterns; every REM cycle is nicely charted with multicolored bars.

To Coupland, the colonization presents us with an intellectual paradox—we know everything and we know nothing. Shoveling the Internet into our brains gives us a mental state where “we acknowledge that we’ve never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we’ve never felt stupider.” The word he uses to describe this paradox is “smupid” (a portmanteau of “smart” plus “stupid”). Smupid people acknowledge their enhanced intelligence but feel stupid because the info was just
way
too easy to access. There’s a
Financial Times
piece he’s written that gives an example of smupid thinking: “Last month someone showed me a page of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
and I looked at the words on the paper and I kept waiting for the article to translate itself. I felt
smupid
.”

I tell him I’m interested in undoing my own smupidity by trying something drastic—a vacation in the tech environment of my childhood. “I want to take a month off from the Internet,” I tell him. “An e-mail sabbatical. I’m also going to leave the phone at home. It’s sort of like a reverse Rumspringa.”

“Man,” he says, squinting across the room. “You couldn’t
pay
me to go back in time.”

“You don’t think there’ll be any value in it?”

“Well, maybe. Are you expecting a revelation, though? I mean, you can take a sabbatical from the Internet if you want, but it would be like taking a sabbatical from shoes.” I feel foolish, then, and don’t know what to say next.

A few days later, Coupland invites me back to talk some more. We sit in a work area off the kitchen this time—amid piles of books and papers, scribbles of ink and cobblings of Lego and hits of primary color buzz the room up with the beginnings of eighty-two thousand ideas. We’re into the coffee again and our laptops are facing each other so I get the feeling we’re about to play a game of Battleship.

We start talking about Alan Turing and his conflation of human intelligence with computers. Coupland’s saying, “You know, it may be that our emotions are just the simplest way to code certain information—” Then there’s a rattle outside. A blue jay on the gravel. Coupland gets up to feed the bird through a slat in the window. A moment later, the bird’s skirted around to a pond. “Oooh, beauty moment,” he says. And we pause the tech talk to watch the jay, whose own opinions shall remain unpublished.

I ask again about absence.

“Well . . . ,” he says. “Well, yes, there’s beachcombing.”

“Beachcombing?”

“I go with Gordon Smith [the ninety-five-year-old painter]. It’s our favorite thing on earth, beachcombing. We have elaborate trips. The thing about it is you’re walking, it’s physical in a nice way, and you’re gazing at the ground. Your brain goes into this mode . . . There’s one beach with barnacles, another where the Haida people have chucked all their old bones and the ocean has churned them over . . . You do it for an hour or two or three and your brain starts to feel like you’ve taken the best nap ever. You go nonverbal. To this place without words.”

We’re quiet ourselves for a beat, and my gaze dodges reflexively back to my laptop’s screen. I look up: “You said once that the Internet could make you tired of knowing everything. Were you joking, or being serious?”

“Maybe.”

• • • • •

Down the road was that green hill of mine. I still had some shaky memory of feeling at peace there in a way I’d never been since. And so, the next day, I walked the trail alone and took myself partway up the grassy rise. I patted my pockets, thinking I should turn off my phone, until I remembered that I hadn’t brought it with me. I lay down with an old-man groan and looked up at the blue above me, tried to imagine billions of phone calls and Web searches flying across the air, leaving colored jet streams, until everything above was a weave of tight connections.

I thought of Kenny, who would be wondering about lunch; and my parents, to whom I should send a “Happy Anniversary” text; editors in Toronto and New York who wanted their updates; and all the messages I needed to send or receive in order to get what I wanted, in order to make sure. . . .

I wanted badly, then, to have some revelation—even kept blinking at the sky, to reboot it. I thought it was
time
for my revelation, that I deserved by now some newfound silence or solitude that would close this book on a happy, even inspirational, lob. I was ready for my personal transformation.

But let me tell you the truth, instead.

If you look closely at the loss of lack, the end of absence—if you do some work to look past the fantastic gains of speed and manic social grooming—you’ll catch only glimpses of that earlier mentality. Lost absence flits from your gaze like the floaters on the eye’s lens, which we sometimes apprehend but can never focus on. To sense the end of absence is to intuit only.

I can make my little changes now. I turn off the phone, I ignore the e-mail; I do seek out solitude. Not pathologically, but enough. It was just small changes, really. Those, and this larger one: the fact that I feel
awake
to the end of absence, now. It hurts a little more to be without it.

So I take these small steps up the trail, I come back to the green hill. That’s the job I’m giving myself. Come back to the green hill, look around, look just here and just with my eyes, look alone. It’s as though absence were a supernatural jewel that I dropped somewhere in the grass. It’s that hidden—and that priceless.

Joseph Weizenbaum, the man who invented ELIZA, predicted in his 1976 book,
Computer Power and Human Reason
, that the computer would now “
intrude itself
into the very stuff out of which man builds his world.” He believed that our computers were integral parts of our perception and being—that we truly are cyborgs. He foretold that ripping the computer tool from us would be as damaging to society as ripping out a lung from a body. But that can’t be the whole story.

Each technology is born of a particular global context, rife with specific economic, political, and even doctrinal expectations. We need, as Neil Postman suggests, a “
psychic distance
from any technology” so that it always appears strange to us, “never inevitable, never natural.”

Homeward bound. Here I stand on the bus, its progress shaking me a little in my place as I hang one-armed from the strap. And all around me, the young and not so young are banishing their boredom by pouring their attention into games like
Angry Birds
and
Jewel Quest
on their phones. The bus rattles around a corner and we all sway in unison, we bump into one another, but nobody looks up. An elderly woman, with perfect white hair, turns to look out the window and appears to disappear.

• • • • •

Jaron Lanier wrote that “
one good test of whether an economy is humanistic
or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.” This seems a good gauge to me. And I know that dropping out of our current information economy would indeed damage my livelihood, put me at odds with the “ordinary” lives of my peers. It’s this fact of the hassle—the incorrectness of dropping off the grid—that solidifies my ambition to do it.

I decide that I
will
take that sabbatical from the future. For thirty days, I will return to something akin to the technological circumstances of my childhood. No Internet. No mobile phone. No Twitter or Facebook or text messages; no self-diagnosis of pneumonia on Mayoclinic.org. I alert all my editors, family members, and closest friends that they can phone me if they want to, but if I’m away from home, they’ll have to leave a message because my phone is now duct-taped to a phone cord I found at Future Shop and that cord is, itself, duct-taped to the kitchen counter. And then I walk away.

• • • • •

MY ANALOG AUGUST

August 1

Every morning Kenny and I eat our cereal next to each other at the long wooden table, each facing our respective laptops. It’s nice. We look at our blogs and collect necessary narratives for dispersal throughout the day with other happy informed citizens. I’ll call Kenny over to check out a trailer for the new
Hunger Games
and he’ll pull me over to see a piece of animation from London’s The Line studio. We dip our heads in the ocean together.

This morning K. went to his usual post and I sat at the kitchen table alone with my raisin bran. I blinked at the empty chair across from me and called to the next room: “You don’t want to come have breakfast?”

“I
am
having breakfast.”

“I mean with
me
.”

“No, I’m okay.” There’s a video playing on repeat and K.’s cracking up.

Torture.

Feels like I just stepped off an incredibly fast ride and the sheer
s-l-o-w-n-e-s-s
of everything is freaking me out. Every five minutes my brain asks me to look up a fact or an image that it’s lacking. What does Kate’s baby look like, again? How many references to robots are there in Alan Turing’s scientific papers? It feels insane to not be allowed to know. I have to let questions constantly slide away, unanswered.

Hello, 1987.

August 2

I thought I’d feel comfortable asking strangers for the time but, instead, have been forced to constantly buy things in order to check time on receipts. Then Kenny gave me a watch today. Very funny contraption. I feel like a man with a pipe.

August 3

Impulse to check e-mail continues unabated. Definite sense that I’m maiming my own career and have grown certain that several lucrative book/movie deals are expiring in my in-box.

The phone is, meanwhile, surprisingly easy to leave at home. I keep picking it up, though, on my return, expecting dozens of messages. In fact, only person to contact me in past 48 hours was a volunteer from a charity service called Big Brothers. (A sign?)

Went for leisurely cocktail at West with K. and Vince this eve, then home alone for viewing of
Pride & Prejudice
while they went out for Pride weekend beer-up. I was in bed by ten; have arrived at “recluse” stage faster than expected.

August 6

The instinct to check e-mail comes naturally each morning, insistent as the urge to shower, to put on the kettle. I feel unawake without messages, as though am wrapped in some cotton batting. Simultaneously: feel like a child who ran away from home and then was crushed to discover nobody noticed his disappearance.

August 8

I dream of e-mail. All night I crafted perfect missives to Barack Obama and Kirsten Dunst. Alas.

August 11

Stood in Chapters for half an hour reading a cover story in
Fast Company
by a man called Baratunde Thurston who disconnected from Internet for 25 days. Felt very smug reading it as Thurston was still texting and using Google Calendar; he even had a personal assistant log in every few days to make sure he didn’t “miss anything urgent.” Thurston writes that he experienced “an expansion of sensations and ideas” (vague) during his quasi sabbatical, which leaves me very excited about my true sabbatical as my more extreme disconnection will surely lead to a proper epiphany that surpasses his meager revelations.