CVB, New Roman Times, QAnon, and Walter Kirn
In 2006 Walter Kirn published a serialized novel on Slate.com called The Unbinding. While major literary figures from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Dostoevsky And Armistead Maupin published major works in this format, when Kirn's novel appeared on Slate.com, it may have been the first to include an embedded addendum in the form of hyperlinks.
Knowing that addendum would get lost in the print version, Kirn solved this by bolding the words so one could look up up the links via his website. I have seen other authors do this by including actual links in the footnotes. Jaron Lanier comes to mind.
And while I dimly recall hearing about this serial in Slate as it was coming out, my encounter with it was in print, 13 years later. I ordered the book on Amazon. It arrived yesterday and I read it straight through, pausing only long enough to grab a pen to mark of favorite lines in the wee hours of the morning. I suppose that's adding my own addendum of sorts, because what I underlined set my mind spiraling off in different directions.
The plot centers around Kent Selkirk, who works for AidSat, a sort of OnStar on steroids that sees him playing the role of Agony Aunt, assistant 911 operator or human Siri, for complete strangers whose life he interacts with in profound or mundane ways for brief moments at a time.
Kent then abuses his status as an Information Holder to gather data on a woman he fancies in his apartment complex. Perhaps the right word is "stalk," but knowing how much online behavior has warped our ethics since the publishing of this novel, it almost seems hyperbolic to call it so.
Kent gets to know Sabrina and her friend the Colonel Geoff, a person who sounds like a mental case causality of Hollywood. And yet. In a parallel plot that gradually intertwines in what Kent assumes to be a blossoming friendship with a guy at his gym becomes a strange cat-and-mouse with a strange Columbo-like in-person dialogue often becoming more sinister in email form. The classic intertwining stories are sometimes difficult to sort out. And that's the point.
The largest theme running through the novel is identity. Are we the same person online as we are offline? How do our in-person interactions with people differ, or how have they been altered by the many "characters," we pretend to be online? Even Kent's job is character acting; he's been rigorously trained, after all.
Jaron Lanier has posited our biggest mistake was allowing social media and online culture to guide our ethics and morals rather than the other way around. Even a cursory examination of the past two decades shows how much of a detriment this caused. The rise of rampant music and movie piracy with sites like Limewire and (initially) Napster and Megaupload, online bullying, trolls egging people on to kill themselves, doxxing and the toxcicity that was Gawker are a few of the more pernicious examples.
But they also occur in more subtle ways, too. Narcissism, The constant desire to live out loud, receive likes and be there for a real or imagined crowd of followers. There's a strange biblical undertone to it all. As if exalting one's self as a form of sanctification. Except obviously with the neuroses it is causing, this is anything but. How could it be, when, much like Kent and AidSat, the tech companies are shaping our unwitting psyches with each new piece of data they mine? On this last point, Lanier makes the case this is but one of many reasons why we should delete our social media accounts.The same kind of White Knight martyrdom is prevalent in Twitter's language about itself. The Trust and Safety Council (made up of members we didn't elect) have absolute control over anyone who chooses to use the site. But for every asshole with a Christ complex there are just as many of us who are worn down from constant information and the compulsion to participate in it all, for fear of missing out. Or like they say in my Advertising industry business, FOMO.
Two sentences in the novel particularly jumped out at me last night that sum up the ennui.
Tired of being America's self-appointed protector. And equally contemptuous of the people they are protecting. That word, contempt, is one I've been using a lot to describe Silicon Valley lately. Especially when it comes to the creative class.
In The Unbinding, Sabrina's friend, Colonel Geoff, is described as being "...delusional, racked with fears and theories. The main one involved some event called 'the Unbinding,' which he said to Sabrina might take place soon..." Reading that made me think of QAnon and the #GreatAwakening hashtag that ocassionally pops up in my timeline. I haven't bothered investgating much; I know Kirn has published an articleon it.
Q is seen as a prophet, or an elaborate hoax by channers, or a false prophet who accidentally gets some details right, if Jeffrey Epstein's recent case is any indication. Perhaps another theory is that Q is all three, much like Kent's multiple personalities online and off. His name makes me think of Clark Kent, the character Superman played when he wasn't busy saving the world. A warped version of the everyman.
The novel came out in 2006, a full year before the iPhone and two years after Camper Van Beethoven's album New Roman Times. Both works are extremely prescient in that they virtually predict where we are today.
In the novel, the fragmented, and slightly demented state of communication, oddly or purposefully brought about by revolutionary inventions like the internet, email, iPhone, Myspace, Facebook and Twitter– all designed to make communication easier.
In the album, America isn't a collection of states but a continent made up of different countries, which the largest being California and Texas. The title New Roman Times, suggests a corruption on the typeface Times New Roman. But it also echoes the fall of Roman Times. That both author and band tapped into to this zeitgeist in roughly the same time probably had much to do with the media's constant fomenting a division as it did with the previous decade's atrocities mass shootings, Atlanta Olympic bombing, Unabomber manifestoes, Oklahoma City Bombing, Waco standoffs and more. Songs like The Militia Song" and "Civil Disobedience"quite reminiscent of those times. Consider the first verse and chorus:
When they come to your home
You know they'll never leave you alone
You know you're on their list
I guess you won the one they missed
Have you been doing something wrong?
Well, I guess you've known that all along
So, when they come to take you away
Are ya gonna go with them on that day?
Will you know what to do?
Will you know what to do?
Will you do it?
Will you do what you want to do?
When I was asked to create a novel out of New Roman Times, I certainly recalled that era, too. But as I began writing it, the election of Donald Trump (or more precisely, the media's daily over-the-top reaction to it) couldn't help but inform the writing process.
While Kirn shifted the narrative from first person with diaologue to journal entry to emails to overheard conversations in The Unbinding, I used a similar approach with New Roman Times.
I set out to disrupt a traditional narrative with as many different formats as possible, including YouTube commentators, right wing radio hosts, local progressive NPR shows, Blog posts, college radio dj's and more. It felt like the story called for a skewering the so-called "different viewpoints," in our culture. But they had another function, too. They acted like a shapeshifting Greek chorus who may or may not be telling the truth because it was important that every chapter cast doubt on the previous chapter.
Before I began writing, and definitely during the process, I spent ungodly hours absorbing as much of this different media as possible to get the tone and cadence right, because I knew the more authenticity there was, the harder it would be to understand what was true and what wasn't.
What is disturbing to me, is that all of the writing happened before I even became aware of QAnon and the particular plot twists and subplots of that "narrative." A year after publishing New Roman Times, and it feels like with some of the newer stories coming to life in Hollywood and in the Government, life might be imitating art at a faster pace.
Incidentally, this is the reason I chose not to use real names in the story, although astute readers might be able to figure out who they are meant to satire. Like New Roman Times the album, and The Unbinding, absorbing the times is necessary to find the themes, but sticking too close to times just ends up dating yourself.