The Lonely City (26 page)

The relief of virtual space, of being plugged in, of having control. Everywhere I went in New York, on the subway, in cafés, walking down the street, people were locked into their own network. The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone. Only the homeless and the dispossessed seemed exempt, though that’s not counting the street kids who spent every day hanging out in the Apple store on Broadway, keeping up on Facebook even – especially, maybe – if they didn’t have anywhere to sleep that night.

Everyone knows this. Everyone knows what it looks like. I can’t count how many pieces I’ve read about how alienated we’ve become, tethered to our devices, leery of real contact; how we are heading for a crisis of intimacy, as our ability to socialise withers and atrophies. But this is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We haven’t just become alienated because we’ve subcontracted so many elements of our social and emotional lives to machines. It’s no doubt a self-perpetuating cycle, but part of the impetus for inventing as well as buying these things is that contact is difficult, frightening, sometimes intolerably dangerous. Despite an advert then prevalent on the subway that declared
Your favourite part of having a smartphone is never having to call anyone again
, the source of the gadget’s pernicious appeal is not that it will absolve its owner of the need for people but that it will provide connection to them – connection, furthermore, of a risk-free kind, in which the communicator need never be rejected,
misunderstood or overwhelmed, asked to supply more attention, closeness or time than they are willing to offer up.

According to the psychologist Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT who has been writing about human-technology interactions for the past three decades and who has become increasingly wary of the ability of computers to nourish us in the ways we seem to want them to, part of the screen’s allure is that it facilitates a dangerously pleasurable self-forgetfulness in something of the same manner as the analyst’s couch. Both spaces offer up a complicated set of possibilities, an alluring oscillation between the dyad of hidden and seen. Lying on their back, witnessed by but unable to glimpse the observer who watches over them, the analysand dreamily narrates their life story. ‘Likewise, at a screen,’ Turkle writes in
Alone Together
:

. . . you feel protected and less burdened by expectation. And, although you are alone, the potential for almost instantaneous contact gives an encouraging feeling of already being together. In this curious relational space, even sophisticated users who know that electronic communications can be saved, shared, and show up in court, succumb to its illusion of privacy. Alone with your thoughts, yet in touch with an almost tangible fantasy of the other, you feel free to play. At the screen, you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. It’s a seductive but dangerous habit of mind.

Alone Together
was published in 2011. The third in a trilogy about relationships between humans and computers, it’s the result of years of research projects, of observing and discussing how technology is used and feels with many different kinds of people, from school children nervously mothering Tamagotchis and teenagers struggling with the demands of virtual and real social lives to isolated seniors coddling therapeutic robots in nursing homes.

In Turkle’s first two books,
The Second Self
(1984) and
Life on the Screen
(1992), computers are presented as primarily positive objects. The first, written before the advent of the internet, considers the computer itself as other, ally, even friend, while the second explores the way that networked devices facilitate entry into a liberating zone of exploration and identity play, where anonymous individuals can reinvent themselves, forming connections with people all over the world, no matter how niche their interests and proclivities.

Alone Together
is different. Subtitled
Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other,
it’s a frightening book, conveying an oncoming dystopia in which no one talks or touches, in which robots take on the role of caregivers and people’s identities become increasingly imperilled and unstable as they are simultaneously succoured and surveilled by machines. Privacy, concentration, intimacy: all are lost, worn away by our fixation with the world inside the screen.

How far ahead can you see? For most of us, committed Luddites aside, these more sinister aspects of virtual existence are only just beginning to crest into visibility, two decades after the public launch of the world wide web. But there have been warnings,
both by scientists and psychologists and broadcast through the prescient medium of art. One of the strangest in this latter category was made over fifteen years ago – and not even by an artist but by a dotcom millionaire with money to burn. Prophecy is a strong word, but the things Josh Harris created at the turn of the new millennium have something of the quality of predictive text, capturing not just the shape of the future but also the urges that brought it into being.

*

Josh Harris was an internet entrepreneur, the cigar-chomping poster-boy for the excesses of Silicon Alley, the nickname for the digital industries that burgeoned in New York towards the end of the twentieth century. In 1986, at the age of twenty-six, he’d set up Jupiter Communications, the first internet market research company. It went public in 1988, making him a millionaire. Six years later, he founded a pioneering internet television network, Pseudo, which produced multiple channels of entertainment, each catering for and made by different subcultures, from hip hop and gaming to erotica – the same panoply of communities, in fact, that still colonise the web today.

Years before social media, before Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2006), before Grindr (2009), ChatRoulette (2009), Snapchat (2011) and Tinder (2012), before even Friends Reunited (2000), Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003) and Second Life (2003), not to mention the broadband that made them viable, Harris understood that the internet’s most powerful appeal was not going to
be as a way of sharing information, but rather as a space in which people could connect with others. He foresaw from the beginning that there would be an appetite for interactive entertainment and he also foresaw that people would be willing to pay a good deal in order to participate, to have a presence in the virtual world.

What I am trying to say is that Harris predicted the internet’s social function, and that he did so in part by intuiting the power of loneliness as a driving force. He understood the strength of people’s longing for contact and attention and he also grasped the counterweight of their fear of intimacy, their need for screens of every kind. As he put it in the documentary
We Live in Public:
‘If I’m in a certain mood and stuck with my family or friends, the alleviation to that are virtual worlds’ – a statement that seems obvious now but that in the 1990s was met with amused bafflement, if not outright ridicule.

It seems he knew all this not just instinctively, but because his own early experiences had shaped him into an exceptionally ideal tenant of unreal spaces. There are at present two documentaries about Harris’s strange and turbulent life:
We Live in Public
, which was directed by Harris’s long-term collaborator Ondi Timoner, and
Harvesting Me,
an episode of Errol Morris’s First Person series. There is also a book,
Totally Wired
by Andrew Smith, which charts the rise and fall of the dotcom bubble by way of a wonderfully forensic account of Harris’s exploits over the years. All of these works contain scenes in which Harris describes his childhood, in characteristically aphoristic (also confusing, paranoid and unfinished) sentences, as notably unpeopled and friendless, his emotional
support provided more by television sets than human beings.

He grew up in California, though there was also a stint in Ethiopia: the youngest child in a family of seven, his brothers already well into high school while he toiled through elementary. His father often disappeared, once for so long that the family home was repossessed. His mother worked with delinquent children, drank heavily and was not, by his own or his siblings’ accounts, a nourishing, warm or even very present presence. He grew up semi-feral, foraging for himself and spending most of his time alone, glued to the TV,
Gilligan’s Island
a particular fixation. ‘I think,’ he said in
We Live in Public:

. . . that I love my mother virtually and not physically. I was bred by her to sit in front of a TV set for hours on end. That’s how I’ve been trained. You know the most important friend to me growing up was in fact the television . . . My emotionality is not derived from other humans . . . I was emotionally neglected but virtually I could absorb the electronic calories from the world inside the television.

It’s the sort of thing you can imagine Warhol saying – not so much the neglect, but the sense of kinship with machines, the craving for electronic calories, the desire to enter into an artificial, looking-glass world. Both men maybe saw it as something like an equation, in which the need for intimacy and the fear of it create a stalemate, paralysis, and that rather than struggling in this lonely maze one might simply co-opt devices – cameras, tape
recorders, televisions – using them as shields, distractions, safe zones.

In fact, the two were frequently compared. In the 1990s, the press dubbed Harris the Warhol of the Web, though at the time this was more to do with his penchant for throwing parties and surrounding himself with downtown characters, particularly performance artists, than because he actually produced art himself. All the same, the lineaments of his childhood meant that, like Warhol, he understood the weirdly protective quality of screens, the sense that participating in virtual spaces might be a way of medicating a sense of isolation, a feeling of being left out or going unregarded, without requiring the subtle social skills necessary for IRL interactions. And after all, what better antidote to being alone, all one, than entering the replication machine of the internet, by which the virtues of celebrity could be made available to all.

Harris established Pseudo along the now-familiar lines of social media corporations, with their breakout zones and cheerfully infantile, play-inducing furnishings. It was based in a loft at 600 Broadway, a space that a wry
New York Magazine
profile from 1999 described as being large enough to park a fleet of double-decker buses. Inside, Harris built himself a private apartment, making a personal enclave in what was otherwise a non-stop 24/7 zone of sociability, a frenetic combination of television studio and happening.

Pseudo was conceived and run as a participatory domain, though as with Warhol’s Factory, it was always the same person who settled the bills. The door to the street was left open day
and night, and there were endless parties, many of them filmed and uploaded on the station, blurring the distinctions between work and play, meat and cyberspace. Gamers playing Doom,
The Matrix
projected on to a wall, a queue of models and pop stars snaking down the street: the stuff of dreams, assuming the dreamer had been a nerdy friendless kid in Ventura with his nose to the tube.

Towards the end of the 1990s, Harris’s interest in Pseudo began to wane in favour of an ambitious new project, which might be described as a month-long party, a psychology experiment, an art installation, a durational performance, a hedonistic prison camp or a coercive human zoo. Quiet was conceived as an investigation into surveillance and group living: an experiment designed to test the effects of the oncoming collapse of boundaries between the public and the private that Harris was convinced the internet would bring about. ‘Andy Warhol was wrong,’ he informed a journalist. ‘People don’t want fifteen minutes of fame in their lifetime, they want it every night. The audience want to be the show.’

In the winter of 1999, he rented a dilapidated empty warehouse in Tribeca and set about transforming it into an Orwellian chamber of enchantment, helped by a team of artists, chefs, curators, designers and builders and backed by a seemingly unlimited budget of personal funds. The idea was that sixty people would spend the final month of the millennium living in a communal pod hotel he’d built in the basement. They would be unable to leave, though the public would be free to come and go, enjoying a bountiful libidinal playpen, in which all urges could be gratified,
be it guzzling unlimited liquor at the free bar, dancing in a nightclub called Hell or discharging one’s aggression in a shooting range in the basement that was stocked with submachine guns and live ammo.

Like Pseudo, Quiet was open to all-comers. Over the month of December, the bunker was a honeypot for the
fin de siècle
downtown scene, drawing queues right down the block. The novelist Jonathan Ames was among the crowd and in his ‘City Slicker’ column for
New York Press
he described his adventures there. ‘People,’ he wrote, ‘gathered night after night to drink, smoke pot, grab one another and see strange performances. It was like the Beat generation meets the Internet. Not the best combination perhaps, but amusing and unusually vital, though there was the sense of great waste; I think the Beat generation cultivated their madness on a much lower budget, which seems more virtuous, but that’s only because I have a poor man’s prejudice and snobbery when it comes to money.’

All the beds in the pod hotel were rapidly filled, despite the exacting conditions of entry, which included the necessity of dressing in grey shirts and orange trousers – a uniform that is now disturbingly reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay. The space in which the new citizens of Quiet were confined offered no privacy whatsoever. The bunks were crammed into a single subterranean dormitory, army style. There was only one shower. It had glass walls, and was situated in full view of the dining hall, where elaborate gourmet meals were served free of charge three times a day.