AgPerson

Note: I wrote this entry in late 2012 after finishing the young adult novel Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow, a book that explores, among other things, the consequences of criminal penalties for civil acts like copyright infringement. I was thinking about civil liberties and internet freedoms and what I’ve chosen to do with my life. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the entry after writing it, so it sat for three years. Re-reading it now, the feelings and conflict I expressed still resonate.

I can get to feeling about Cory Doctorow the same way I often feel about Richard Stallman, the famous advocate for free and open-source computer software. Zealots. Troublemakers. Not everything is about The Man out to squash the little guy. Geez, I’m not evil just because I use Apple products! I respect your opinions on copyright and software, on free expression and privacy — but do you have to be so darn annoying about it?!

I suppose it is the same with anyone with a Cause. It makes the rest of us nervous, because we aren’t True Believers like they are. The long and short of it is that I have gotten older and supposedly wiser, and at some point I decided that the world is really complicated. Seeing lots of shades of gray makes it hard to get worked up about causes, which I suppose is why most people don’t.

I do care about this stuff. I care about it a great deal. I care about internet freedom, about privacy, about civil liberties, about remixing and free expression, about individual rights and blanket licenses, internet radio and everything else. I cared about it all through high school — I even took a summer course at UC Irvine in “Internet Law”, back when the whole field could be surveyed in 5 weeks! I followed mailing lists and message boards about the Napster and Kazaa court fights and the DMCA and the Communications Decency Act legislative battles.

When I had the opportunity in college to get an internship for my legal studies minor, I wrangled a placement at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the original epicenter for scholarship in the field of internet law. And when I got my first job out of college, it was at Berkman as well, working alongside some of my heroes.

I thought I would be a public interest lawyer. I thought I would live and breathe this stuff. And I met a lot of very smart people in this field, and I respect them a great deal. But the pace of it didn’t work for me, someone built for high pressure and quick wins. The law is slow and plodding, a years- and decades-long synthesis of law review articles, amicus briefs, books, conferences, and winding cases. It works for many people, and its very good work indeed, but it was not going to work for me.

Now I’m in the fast-paced world of technology, wrapped up in fancy new trends like “DevOps” and “continuous integration” and “infrastructure as code”. There is lots of energy and lots to do. I feel busy and driven, but not the way I felt about internet law. I don’t have the same purpose — I never feel like the work I am doing has the last possibility of fundamentally affecting our culture or reshaping our society. No one is going to jail for abusing deployment frameworks, and no one is passing legislation telling me how I can or cannot administer a web server. The stakes just aren’t very high.

I just finished Cory Doctorow’s latest novel for young adults, Pirate Cinema. The main character is a teenager in a near-future Britain whose (illegal?) video downloading and remixing gets his family “banned” from the internet. This leads to all sorts of serious consequences — his father loses his (online) job, his mother can’t apply (online) for her disability benefits, and his sister fails out of school due to being unable to research and do (online) homework. Embarrassed and ashamed, our young cyber-criminal runs away from home and ends up in London. There he builds a new life after taking up with a loose collection of anarchists, activists, and other down-on-their-luck free-thinkers. Eventually he spearheads a a campaign to overturn the draconian laws that got him in so much trouble in the first place.

It’s all a bit contrived, and some things fall in to place much too easily. Certainly the homeless life is glamorized to a degree I find unsettling. But the fundamental fear expressed in this pointed critique is sound. Yes, Big Content (also known as the entertainment industry) pushes for laws that protect their commercial interests at the expense of our culture. Yes, the penalties for victimless crimes of copyright infringement continue to become more and more harsh. And yes, this leads us down some pretty slippery slopes.

And frankly, it is a whole framework of thought that I have managed to relegate to the dustbin at the back of my brain, a big ball of stuff I believe deeply in but have carelessly shoved aside.

Cory Doctorow’s novel has given me a bit of fire back, and for that I thank him. It also gives me hope. Doctorow postulates a future in which the internet becomes so central to everything we do that the general public has no choice but to stand up and take a stand against the government and corporate control that is clamping down on us from all sides. Doctorow makes a persuasive argument as to why this sort of control is not only wrong, it is destructive to a free society. And he aims to persuade young people who are the most affected by these changes but not always cognizant of them. He is telling them they should care, and I hope his message takes root.

As a young kid I taught myself how to edit videos long before I taught myself how to program. I can only imagine that if I was born ten years later, in the age of high speed internet and much more powerful computers, I would have been a “remixer” myself. Heck, when I was young I saw the world as amazing and wonderful, the future as bright and thrilling and open for the taking. In short, I was just the sort of person liable to get caught in one of these copyright webs and have my life completely ruined.

I can blame my current cynicism on all sorts of things — endless war, recession, the general ennui that comes with growing older. I wish I could recapture some of that excitement, some of that optimism I had as a kid. What gets to me about Pirate Cinema is that by the end I was rooting for our young heroes to succeed, yet all the while convinced that he was writing to us from his eventual jail cell. I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that as I read the final pages tears welled up in my eyes. Not because its the best book or the best story in the world, but because it reminded me about what I care about, and that things are worth fighting for, and that the bad guys don’t always win in the end.

For all that, it is not at all clear that our “hero” lives happily ever after. Doctorow acknowledges that youth can’t last forever, and even the most idealistic of us do have to grow up and face, dare I say it, a more complex, more nuanced world. It is up to each of us, then, to temper our wisdom with a streak of idealism, and to not forget about the causes and morals we hold dear.

I’m in San Francisco for a work conference and was able to snag a last-minute ticket to see the touring production of Book of Mormon at the beautiful Orpheum Theatre. I was sandwiched between a group of 47 lovely residents of an Oakland retirement community. The abundant crude humor in the show made this seating arrangement only slightly awkward.

The show was uproariously funny throughout, but was also laced with sad and even tragic stories. South Park veterans Matt Stone and Trey Parker did an amazing job of using humor to present a thorough and multi-layered social commentary. As I watched the show I kept wondering how much of the audience was grasping the deeply cynical and biting undercurrent of this show. I expect that many were not — and perhaps that in itself is just another joke, this time at the audience’s expense.

Early (and ongoing) humor plays off of Mormon beliefs and practices that are surprising or seem silly to non-Mormon audiences. But time and again the humor is predicated on absurd comparisons to more “mainstream” beliefs. For example, one song by a main character proclaims that “I believe that the Lord God created the universe.” The audience remains silent. He continues, “I believe that He sent His only Son to die for my sins.” No reaction. Then, “and I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America!” Uproarious laughter.

It makes no sense. It’s absurd. Who would believe that? Never stopping to think that the two preceding lines, from a non-Christian, would sound just as absurd. The verse ends with, “a Mormon just believes,” but isn’t that also mocking all others who “just believe” their own deeply held but never critically analyzed religious convictions?

A whole other class of criticism takes the form of upbeat and absurd songs that portray the suffering of the native Ugandans. In chipper tones and catchy music they tell of their children raped by warlords, family members dying of AIDS, and friends felled by preventable diseases like dysentery. The audience laughs along, but at times it becomes sporadic as particular lyrics hit a little close to home.

A memorable song dreams of the magical land of “Salt Lake City” as a place where the “goat meat is plentiful,” the “warlords are friendly,” there is a “Red Cross on every corner,” and “the people are open-minded.” We laugh, then we realize what we are laughing at — the longings of a poor child who can dream of nothing more than a slightly nicer version of the desolate village that is the only life she has ever known.

Interwoven with the stories of the “Africans” are a number of pokes at white Westerners — missionaries and others — who feel entitled to lecture native peoples on how they should be living, push them to change their lives in highly disruptive ways, and then abandon them to deal with the unexpected long-term consequences of the half-baked “improvements” on their own.

The overall theme of the Book of Mormon seems to me to be that well-intentioned, dedicated, and focused individuals can make a positive impact on the world around them, but that the strictures of organized religion often serve to get in the way of or actively subvert that impact. In that way I see it as a message of hope — our society’s accelerating move away from organized religious institutions need not imply that we will become less dedicated to improving the lives of our fellow man. Far from it. Without outdated doctrine and absurd rules getting in the way, real and lasting impacts may finally be achievable.

Many will no doubt disagree with this interpretation. People often tell me that my relentless positivity about our ability to make the world a better place is absurd. But I continue to take to heart John Perry Barlow’s words that groundless hope is the only kind worth having.

I found this novel deeply affecting. I hear from time to time, as everyone does, about various loose relations who have cancer, or are in remission, or have succumb to the disease. I see the cancer stories that describe tragic but stalwart children, their caring and committed parents, the charities they found and causes they champion, the valiant way in which they battle with dignity, their indefatigable courage.

And it all feels like bullshit to me. I don’t have the experience or the pain to justify this feeling, but I feel it all the same. Cancer patients and their families and support networks are not magically heroes. Evolution run amok does not make one noble or immune from normal-person feelings.

I hate the language we use to describe illness. I hate how we so often glorify people suffering from cancer while simultaneously pitying them. I don’t know how to interact with or relate to people who are suffering from disease, and I think the structures we as a society have created make that interaction harder than it should be. When we hold people up on a pedestal due to circumstances outside of their control, we don’t allow them to be normal people with normal-people feelings and concerns and fears and needs.

Anyway.

The Fault In Our Stars is a book about kids with cancer, but it is quick to point out that it is not a “cancer book” full of the standard tropes and plot progressions. The narrator is a teenage girl stricken with a form of the disease that affects her lungs, kept in check via experimental medicines and various machines to assist her breathing. Hazel is weak and frail and still alive long beyond her predicted expiration date. Her Sword of Damocles hangs ever-present as Hazel goes about her daily life, which is entirely normal in as much as she watches trashy TV and goes to the mall, and entirely abnormal in that she has nothing to strive for, few friends, little direction and plenty of pain.

Hazel joins a cancer support group suffused with a macabre sense of competition to outlive and outlast. The reader quickly gets the sense that most of her life post-diagnosis has been like this. There she meets a fellow sufferer, a high school boy with a prosthetic leg and a fear of oblivion.

They form a bond, they share Experiences (capital-E) and pain and fear and philosophy and random poetry and video games. They are overly wordy and prone to soliloquy and sort of strange, but in other ways quite real. They have ways of dealing with cancer and life and parents that feel very authentic to me. Things take dark turns, then people get better, then they get worse again. The future is uncertain, except that it is completely certain — dying is the endgame, and sooner rather than later.

How do you live when so much of your waking time is spent worrying about and wondering about and trying to fend off death? It is horrible and tragic but sometimes brilliant and funny and often just numbingly depressing. It is living, it is not living, it is a disease that doesn’t make sense and isn’t supposed to and doesn’t magically make people heroic or different, a disease that doesn’t care in a world that doesn’t care in a universe full of lives and people that may not have any meaning at all.

Oblivion. How do you face it? What choices do you make, when you aren’t given a chance to go out in a blaze of glory or on your own terms, but instead only slowly, by inches, in pain and agony and sadness? What does it all mean? Why should it mean anything? And how do you deal with that, each and every day?

Deep questions. Dark questions. Real questions.

Thank goodness there is a happy ending. Hazel and her friends figure everything out and feel better and know that they have accomplished something real and lasting and memorable.

No, I made that up. Of course it doesn’t end that way. It can’t. It just ends when it ends, as we all do. A surprising ending, but not surprising at all.  Because that’s how endings are.  They come along when you least and most expect them.  Sometimes, right in the middle of a

 
Sara Gruen drew me in to her story of Great Depression-era circus life.  Meticulously researched and augmented with real photographs, this historical fiction novel is captivating and engrossing.

The framing of the story through the eyes of a reminiscing geriatric provides lots of opportunities for additional reflection and contemplation on changes in our world, although few are seized. His interactions with other patients and nurses are an interesting addition but offer little payoff.

Early on we meet roustabouts, carnival barkers, sideshow freaks, dwarves, and animals, and we learn about the pace of life on a traveling circus with clear class divides.  The “backstage” reality is gritty and tiring and hard-charging, and fascinating to behold. In the back third the pace of the story greatly accelerates and the romantic angle takes center stage, leading to a too-neat conclusion with little time to reflect on the human cost.

I can forgive the frequent telling-not-showing (with the requisite dumb as a brick narrator needed everything to be explained), I can overlook the romantic obsession, and I can accept the very limited development of secondary characters, but the present-day ride into the sunset ending is too ridiculous to bear.  I choose to believe that the modern-day denouement is just a crazed vision in old Jacob’s head, and somehow that makes this book work better for me.