Internet Au Lait Dot Com by Gerry Smith
Lurking across the street from the Falafel King and kitty-corner to Sonny's Discount Health and Beauty is the World Wide Web. It is an inauspicious location in Minneapolis for high-tech sophistication. Outside, the marquee shouts: "CyberX -- net, food, espresso -- Internet Coffeeshop - Center for Javatronic Stimulation." Inside, cables course the ceiling joists and coffee-stained couches lounge everywhere, each littered with an array of doughnut crumbs, cigarette butts, and internet zines. Here, the aesthetic is to keep the coffee out of the keyboard, light up and dial in -- a virtual opium den for nerds and curious caffeine addicts. For $6 an hour ($7/hr. peak rates), you can cozy up to one of a half dozen computer nodes to lose time and money while you wait and read, wait and read, wait and read... Meanwhile, your coffee gets cold and skanky.
In joints like this, high-technology is made "user-friendly." The technology isn't any easier to use but you can bitch and moan about the software glitches and slow retrieval times with others while dunking doughnuts in a friendly atmosphere. Don't misunderstand me, I am just as fascinated with the internet and all of its potential (especially for the artist) as the next technophile. Paul Valéry's pre-computer age prognostication for the impact of technology on the practice of a meaning of art is surely relevant to computer technology and the internet. But I don't like high-technology ruining my experience of a good cup of hot coffee.
This seemingly innovative merger of the internet and espresso (however marketable and therefore inevitable it may be) threatens what I view as the coffee shop's most sacrosanct cultural virtue: it is one of the few remaining public, urban bastions where distractions are minimized and unsophisticated self-examination can occur. I'm not talking about the experience of guzzling something hot during a check of your "To Do" list for the day, but rather those precious minutes when you can curl your body around a steamy brew with prolonged thoughts and daydreams generated by your own brain. For me, my best thinking takes place where the technology factor is low, or at least, no higher than the newspaper.
So, as I sat in CyberX, face first in a monitor, I began to wonder what the personal costs would be if we continue to allow technologies to run interference with what little remaining personal time and space we have. I was reminded of a statement written in 1974 by Donald P. Geesaman. Geesaman was an outspoken critic of nuclear power plants and the uses of Plutonium in the 1970's. He is portrayed in the movie Silkwood as one of the two scientists that speaks about the dangers of Plutonium to Silkwood's colleagues at her nuclear plant prior to their unionization. He wrote the following shortly after Karen Silkwood's untimely death and the subsequent investigation into its circumstances. It is called "Advice to Science Students."
I sat down last night at eleven o'clock and I asked myself, "If I had only ten minutes to speak to science students what would I tell them," and I decided that I would tell them the following:
I was the son of a country doctor, I grew up in a small, idyllic town in Eastern Nebraska in the 1930's, and I believe that I lived then through a brief Utopia. And as a bright punk kid I went away to college where I learned the rituals and poetry of theoretical physics, and afterwards I worked for many years in the schizoid, surrealistic world of a nuclear weapons laboratory where I was drawn into the politics of its purposes, and where I came to understand the sacraments of modern technology as a desecration of the self.
Now, looking back I recognize that there were elegant languages in science and perfect orderings in technology, but those things seem remote and obvious like the stars, while there are things that are less remote and less obvious that students of science should know.
They should know that the scientific community is for the most part comprised of overspecialized hacks and moral eunuchs indentured to government and industry.
They should know that the technological purpose is in fact the development of aggregates of political and economic power and that the usual form of that development is at best a WPA project, and at worst an ethical abomination.
They should know that the notion of our natural environment is a monstrous fiction, and that in reality we live in a world of human artifacts where things happen largely through the intercession of human intelligence.
They should know that we persist in a pre-fascist political state where we are alienated by the very hegemony of non-participatory democracy that the complexity of our lives forces us to accept.
They should know that we live in a social condition distinguished by information instead of wisdom, consensus instead of intelligence, euphemism instead of awareness, service instead of competence, dependence instead of responsibility.
Much of our social and physical state is a shadow thrown across our lives by our technologies. From conception to death, our lives are becoming mere technological artifacts. We are possessed, subjugated, exiled.
A civilization that perceives technology only as a word in the language of power, is a civilization of many hidden covenants by which the individual and the content of his life are poorly served.
Granted, internet coffee shops are not particularly sophisticated places, nor are they necessarily owned by multinational corporations or governments with ulterior motives (I am not advocating paranoia here although the CyberX does have surveillance cameras watching your every move). Internet coffee shops, however, are in their own clumsy way facilitating the march of technology into the interstices of our lives -- the spaces we reserve for private contemplation. And, in doing so, they are playing a role as co-conspirator in technology's relentless and profound changing of our social and personal consciousness.
Regardless of whether it is a political, moral, economic or social change, it is a change towards further imbedding our conscious lives in a dependence upon technology. What was once intended to serve us is now beginning to enslave us. I am finding that the more I use the internet for information gathering, entertainment or communication, the less adequate, or capable, or effective I feel when I am without it. It's that irritating "what am I missing out on?" feeling that constitutes the internet's shadow now thrown over me. And, when I step into the CyberX, I am reminded of my own singularity, finitude and tiny significance. That damn World Wide Web is well named.
If the internet is here to stay (which it is) then all I ask is STAY OUT OF MY COFFEE CUP! Give me a double espresso, a table in the corner and leave me to my own imagination. Call me a Luddite or call me primitive, just know that I am especially nonfunctional and dangerous in the morning before I have had my first shot of caffeine. It is a state that is definitely not "internet-friendly."
Gerry Smith is an artist and writer living in Minneapolis.
