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Humankind is co-evolving with its artifacts,
and the genes that can’t cope with that new reality
will not survive into future millennia.
– Michael Schrage, Wired magazine (1995)
The new technology manager sat in my office
the other day to complete an interview
for the employee newsletter.
“You cannot manage the new technology,”
he said, tapping his laptop for emphasis.
“You can only fall into its flame
and pray to burn profitably.”
This guy’s worked 70-hour
weeks for more than a decade
to arrive exactly here.
He’s a good Puritan, a Christian family man,
balding and squinty and rumpled,
his eyes sad like Einstein’s but
fixed on a more frenzied, dark horizon.
He recently won our company’s
top management award
for attending the birth
of complex advertising system
that will exchange its data
with other systems
easily, efficiently, and fast,
eventually driving dozens
of jobs off the flow chart
into Whatever.
He continued.
“All we are is a sieve,
frail impediments
in a torrid runoff
we call change.
That force is madness.
The only surety
is a greater,
more efficient madness.
We pan neck deep
in the cold foam of
accumulating knowledge,
more likely swept
onto the rocks
than toward any
semblance of home.”
I asked him,
what about us,
so many business bees
clustered in this
whirling hive of stress?
He looked away.
Wrong question.
His voice was bolstered
with long-surrendered pain.
“Reconcile your chains,” he said.
“Your liver must be plucked
by ever-new systems of god.
Forget that passionate music of career.
In the new organware,
connectedness runs
so deep that one life exists
only to support countless others.
We exist in a supple, cognite web,
a glowing complexity
deep in a belly
we can never rise from.”
I shifted in my chair.
The room was too warm,
too crowded with machines.
Coworkers hacked away
in stale fluorescence.
Phones kept ringing
for the dead.
I asked, then how
to find a foothold
on so slippery a future?
“Forget trying to understand
your job, our company,
this business,” he said.
“Tomorrow careens away too fast.
Your job survives only
as chance surrender
to quicksilver evolutions
too manic to name.
Bury the old algorhythms
that once composed the chart.
A new jazz thrums
with polyrhythms and pluck,
pumped on the sugar of teams.
The individual dies
in a swelter of irritation
and grief forever waylaid.”
“You see,” he said, scratching
his thin gray beard,
smoothing the few hairs
left on his head,
“The future’s a
succubi, technic and rabid
to swathe the bank-
accounts of its stockholders.
As drones we are potent
only in defiance of
the life we leave behind.”
“Do not despair,” he smiled,
gentle, dangerous.
“There is no going back.
Gently and reverently profess
the Change which blows you
to smithereens.
Your anger is obsolete
and conspires to thwart the work
that must get done.
Please do not rock the boat;
the waves are fickle and ignorant
and have already caught the best of us.
We must pull together.
Accept there is no alternative.
No one can help you.”
He stood. “Such are the
laws of the future
buried in all I really said.”
I thanked him for his time
and pressed an f-key on my keyboard.
The image of the new technology manager
flickered in a wave of pixels
and was gone.
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Submitted to Real Toads’ Conversation Poem challenge.
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Note
This was written in 1995, while I was still working at the local daily newspaper. Although newspapers have been defined by spasmodic waves of technological change (in its early days, nobody who wanted to make a buck went into newspapering because it took so long to assemble a page using movable type), nothing quite paralleled the advent of personal computers and networking in the 1980s and the massive systems overhaul in the ‘90s that aimed to link newspaper creation workflow throughout a corporate chain of newspapers into a single process. When I left the newspaper in 1998, there were about 1800 employees. The paper still exists–though owned by Tribune, which for all its forward thinking is now mired in bankruptcy–but the workforce is a third of that size today, technology having made it a mercurial, efficient, doomed dinosaur. Sometimes I dream of that building whose halls I walked for 18 years, grandly and mercilessly empty. All that innovation gutted the company to compete in an increasingly indifferent market. I mean, who reads the paper any more?
Oh, and the new technology manager I interviewed: In a few years he became vice president/director of information technology and systems, then apparently demoted to special projects manager (whether by force or choice, I’m sure that his was the sweatiest trench to work in), then left the company in 2005 to become a “consultant” (Linked-in profile), a typical backwater for the outsourced and outdated, especially for older, benefits-costly managers. There but for the grace of another tech-addicted corporation go I.
My father was a newspaperman, rising from reporter to city editor and so forth. He was quite professionally accomplished, and it gives me a pang, on his account (though he is long deceased) to see how the business has changed. As for who reads newspapers anymore, I do. I must have my advice columns, for one thing. And my trivia and crossword and comics. (“Pearls Before Swine”! Yes!) And the sports, when they talk about my beloved Tigers. And the opinion pieces and movie reviews. Even the business section sees duty, placed beneath my dog’s water bowl. But I know that it is mostly only geriatrics who still get the paper. And me. I’m not quite ancient yet.
I don’t think I could have restrained the impulse to stick a waste basket upside down over the nattering head of your speaker in this piece, though do look around my house, at the books and cd’s and non-plasma tv, and think, it’s happened; I’ve become a time capsule. Ah well, I am happy here. I even cook. That is, when I am not defending myself from predators with the bony spikes along my tail, and foraging on the rich tropical plants of my hothouse world.
Well, our local paper (and my former employer) has shrunk to a size of a used hankie, so there just isn’t anything to read there, either … I get NY Times on kindle and online, though I sure miss having a couple of lazy hours on Sunday with classical music on the stereo & reading the Sunday Times … I still sell to newspapers and so my career fortunes continue to sink with them; I’ve access to archives of newspapers going back to the 1920s, too, and am in them a lot nowadays for a new venture (retromania plus puzzles), so the ghosts of the great days of newspapering are loud all about me. It amazes me how so many young ‘uns text and talk on celllphones at the gym (some of them would surely make a Blossom bloom in Fire); I have an Android cell phone that I use to make calls and set the alarm to wake me up in the morning, that’s all.
So … are we ever gonna get a a peek into FB’s pre-quantum sanctum? Archaeologists of pre-Matrix America are just dying to know!
We pan neck deep
in the cold foam of
accumulating knowledge…
Such a telling segment of this poem. I have to agree with Shay. I went into a depression when I realized that ‘they’ were making my precious LP records obsolete, and I refuse to now go the way of ebooks. However, the writing is on the wall.
Thanks Kerry — My wife and I have kept a good number of our vinyl records, and one of the easier thrift-shop finds out there are old yet still playable LPs — everything from Patsy Cline to Beethoven to Eddie Hayes (jazz pianist) to Burt Bacharach (yeah, I’m a sucker for scmhaltz, as well as pulp detective fiction and vintage Playboy mags.) I’ve tried reading via ebook and never been satisfied; e-reading Moby Dick is like ocean-voyaging in a bathtub. Something about holding that big volume in hand, turning heavy cream pages (in my edition, at least), just travels so much further. Thanks for reading …
Brendan, this is a very chilling write!
“All we are is a sieve,
frail impediments
in a torrid runoff
we call change.
That force is madness.
The only surety
is a greater,
more efficient madness.
One truly hopes that what he was saying is not true; but unfortunately I see a lot of ideas expressed, the one I copied above and others, that do seem to describe what really is happening in (parts of) today’s work world. Quite a conversation indeed.
Thanks Mary — That madness may be pre-initiatory, the way the shamans went crazy and then had their initiation-dreams, their fractured psyches re-assembled by a guiding spirit that, if the shaman survived the ordeal (and many times they died), enabled them to “see” the sources of disease and know which songs would heal them. We can only hope our own madness has a distant, sweet shore …
Every single stanza in this is deadly, bleeding and true. Frankly it reminds me of the deep welling lost feeling I get reading the WWI poets talking about battle lines, soldiers and blown up corpses that no one whatsoever now living is able to really connect to…great slaughter for a ‘great’ purpose, moldering in the back issues of history. Like everything, the death of print–such a fundamental strut of progress–leaves a void that will be filled by something, but what? Text messages, implanted neural chips that once and for all make the species a Hive? Will it be anywhere near as worthy, as rich, or infinitely more so? When you destroy ( a working class, a civilization, a way of life, ) it takes time to recreate any depth of meaning from the shattered remnants. That’s why, I think, our age seems increasingly shallow and empty–we’re driven before this technological gale too fast to see what, if anything, is following behind. Fine fine piece, Brendan, asking all the right questions, for which we can’t know the answers yet, but can have our strong regrets that they are what they are.
You remind me of the Welsh modernist poet David Jones, whose first volume “In Parenthesis” was a long poem about something that was cut off, irrevocably, in the the trenches of the First World War — old Europe lost in that massive dying. His subsequent efforts were deeply immersed in the language and idiom of pre-Christian Europe (“The Anathemata” is wonderful), and, an artist as well, he practiced writing manuscripts in the same sort of hand that wrote the about the Battle of Hastings in tapesty. I don’t think he was able to bridge his way back (though is book of essays “Artist and Epoch” is truer to the mark), but I recall reading him and thinking, hmmm, maybe the way forward can be found by going further back. Ergo, myth is hyper-science. At least it’s kept me inspired to keep looking in the dirt for those future faces. (Methinks that face will resemble my St. Oran’s, who was devout in saying that the way it is is not the way I currently think at all.)
And Erich Neumann once said in his book on the evolution of consciousness (Jungian rather than Jaynesian), that after a cultural canon is demolished, it takes centuries of practicing new rites before a new center becomes firm enough. I definitely think we’re in that time — a sort of digital dark age — groping desperately for a handhold on something we don’t even have a language for yet. I agree with you, the best we can do now is simply grieve for what is fast disappearing.
Thanks always for the generous reading – Brendan
Wow, a fantastic poem AND great discussion in the comments. Bonus! I worked on one of the olden days newspapers when I was a kid – typesetters hand pressed the type upside down on the page and “Stop the Presses!” was frequently heard. You have written a fantastic treastise on the demise of human workers and the rise of technology. The portrait of your old supervisor is haunting. He talked the talk and fed them his life and still got side lined. My sister works for a bank which is doing the same thing to her. Such a wonderful, intelligent and, sadly, only too true read this was. Thanks to all of you!
Thanks Sherry — corporate ownership of newspapers didn’t come until technology created the sort of efficiencies and smaller payrolls that maximized quarterly profits. When I started at the newspaper in 1980 there were still manual typewriters in Editorial (used by the old stalwart journos) and the typesetters which replaced hot type had only been in use a few years. Wax was still being used for page layout and all the artists were using pens and paper. When I was a buyer I purchased the first personal computers — $12 thousand-dollar Apple Lisas that could only do rough accounting (Visicalc). The IBM pcs followed and over the next six or seven years the building proliferated with them, beginning to form networks that allowed for email and greater efficiencies between the “business units” that resulted in the elimination of many jobs that were farmed out to corporate offices. One the suits got a taste of that blood, the cutting frenzy was on. I also worked in HR and saw the directors performance reports; a remittable accomplishment was how many FTE’s (full time with benefits) positions they had eliminated in the past year. And in the frenzy of adapting to huge systems, people got eaten up and spat out very, very quickly. I was 3 years past burned out when I finally left.
The entire American economy I think has been gutted by this process, as corporate profitablity through technology solutions has become the standard over creating jobs and security for the maximum number of people. I’m part of a class of white-collar workers whose relevance has all but evaporated. I’ve been lucky to stay out of the line of fire til now, but the safety is only tenuous at best. Oh well — Brendan
Brilliant work, Brendan. Terrifying because it’s happening all around us. But, I will not give up my newspaper!
This was a very interesting conversation.
As much as I love the digital conversations through blogging, I really have to have paper. I write my poems on paper with pencil before I can sit at the computer and type. There’s just something innately creative about paper. It’s such a shame what is going on with newspapers and books.
this reminded very much of the great fiction book, Interview with Monsters. I enjoyed how the dialogue mirrored the same old corporate speak and then suddenly took a more truth dive into organs, futility and buried futures. I also liked the balanced perspective of the interviewer and the manager, how the narrator gives balanced facts like 70 hour work weeks and corporate accomplishments.
I would make one suggestion, the first stanza makes it a little unclear if the manager is there to interview the narrator or if the narrator is interviewing the manager. thanks for posting and
viva la
Great stuff, Brendan. Déja vu all over again.
Been there, done that. Many years in the biz, editorial and also composing room (I grew up in a print shop).
My favorite thing at the daily paper was the job I had for several years, doing the stock market reports—first job there to be replaced by a button. Unfortunately, it was no longer my job. Oh, the mileage I’d have made on that if I could.
The newspaper itself still toddles on (7 compositors when there used to be 350) but the stock exchange closed. Cracks me up.
PS—I was a proofreader for too long. Surely you meant “succubus” instead of the plural “succubi”?