The World That's Coming

By 2016, the media ecosystem of 2008 was impossible to recognize. It was the perfect petri dish for a fungus like Trumpism to grow. Trump understood that there were no rules and referees and that a good story was much more valuable than an accurate one. Trump’s main media experiences are the absurdity of reality television and the no-holds-barred world of Big Apple tabloid journalism. Sadly, these were the perfect experiences to compete for president in 2016. In hindsight, it seems obvious that Trump would thrive in this environment. The hints were there all along, going back way before he even ran. To grapple with these changes, I proposed going to Silicon Valley and New York to pick the brains of the smartest people in tech and media to better understand the current state of affairs and where things might be going. I went to Google, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and everywhere in between. I met with the venture capitalists who were looking for the next Google and Facebook. The gravity of the challenge before us came in a meeting in Silicon Valley when I explained the difficulty in getting our message out in the fragmented media environment, and one of the executives from a Silicon Valley giant responded: “We have been wondering the same thing and hoped you had some good ideas.”

As a kid I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.

Born fictioneers, all of us, we quest for causes and explanations, and if they don’t come readily to hand, we make them up, because a wrong answer is better than no answer. Also, a fast good-enough answer is better than a slow perfect answer. We’re devotees of the hunch, estimate, and best guess. I find it hard to watch, say, a David Lynch film like Mulholland Drive, which shards into free-associative imagery halfway through, and not try to figure it out. Critics plague Lynch with “But what does it mean?” It’s not enough to be startling, beautiful, artful, it has to mean, even if much of life simply is. Despite knowing that, my left hemisphere, not content to joyously perceive, insists on asking why. A word children use relentlessly and adults continue asking. And so we pass our lives, striving to make sense, even if it produces nonsense, which, of course, we never utter, only other people with less-exacting minds. Otherwise, we’d feel at sea, and painfully sure, as the philosopher William Gass says in an essay, that “life, though full of purposes, had none, and though everything in life was a sign, life managed, itself, to be meaningless.”

There was this incredible need for spy talk. Julian would often refer to the places where he lived as “safe houses” and say things such as “When you go to Queensland there’s a contact there you should speak to.” “You mean a friend?” I’d say. “No. It’s more complicated than that.” He appeared to like the notion that he was being pursued, and the tendency was only complicated by the fact that there were real pursuers. But the pursuit was never as grave as he wanted it to be. He stuck to his Cold War tropes, where one didn’t deliver a package but made a “drop-off.” One day, we were due to meet some of the WikiLeaks staff at a farmhouse out toward Lowestoft. We went in my car. Julian was especially edgy that afternoon, feeling perhaps that the walls were closing in, as we bumped down one of those flat roads covered in muck left by tractor tires. “Quick, quick,” he said, “go left. We’re being followed!” I looked in the rearview mirror and could see a white Mondeo with a wire sticking out the back. “Don’t be daft, Julian,” I said. “That’s a taxi.” “No. Listen to me. It’s surveillance. We’re being followed. Quickly go left.” Just by comical chance, as I was rocking a Starsky and Hutch–style handbrake turn, the car behind us suddenly stopped at a farmhouse gate and a little boy jumped out and ran up the path. I looked at the clock as we rolled off in a cloud of dust. It said 3:48. “That was a kid being delivered home from school,” I said. “You’re mental.” “You don’t understand,” he said.

Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first. A world without memory is a world of the present. The past exists only in books, in documents.

“Are you out of your mind?!” we sometimes demand. The answer is yes, we are all out of our minds, which we left long ago when our brain needed more room to do its dance. Or rather out of our brain. A born remodeler, it made as many additions as building codes allowed, then designed two kinds of storage bins. Information could be put into things like books that felt good in the hand, and also onto invisible things like airwaves and Internets. “O brave new world,” the sea-child Miranda muses in perfect pentameter in The Tempest, “That has such people in’t.” Common sense tells us that if life exists elsewhere in the universe, it will be far more technologically advanced than we. But our evolution has been deliriously quirky, resulting in beings with bizarre traits and personalities, including, for example, the idea of a personality. I wonder how many other planetarians feel the need to share and document their personal existence in such elaborate ways.

Bill Styron and John Marquand Jr. were also in the bar and there was a certain undeniable decadence in the way we sat there, drinks in hand, watching the kids in the street getting wiped out. Tear-gas fumes began to permeate even the locked doors, and at the height of the slaughter five or six kids were pushed through a plate-glass window on one side of the bar. The cops rushed in after them. “Get the hell outta here!” a cop was yelling, which they were trying to do as fast as possible. But something was wrong with one of them, a thin blond boy about seventeen. “I can’t walk,” he said. “You’ll walk outta here, you little son of a bitch!” said the cop and clubbed him across the side of the head with his stick. Two of the others seized him by the shirt and started dragging him across the floor of the bar and through the lobby. Next to me a middle-aged man, wearing a straw hat with a Hubert Humphrey band, watched the incident with distaste. “Those damn kids,” he muttered, “I haven’t seen a clean one yet.” Then he looked back out into the street where, at that moment, a flying squad of blue helmets and gas masks, clubs swinging, charged straight into a crowd obviously of bystanders. “Hell,” he grunted, “I’d just as soon live in one of those damn police states as put up with that kind of thing.”

I have time for one more question,” Obama said to the donors. I had one eye on Kanye and one eye on my BlackBerry. The event was wrapping up and I was a little annoyed that I had sat in this painfully uncomfortable chair for an hour. I had hurt my back playing basketball, and sitting for long periods of time was incredibly painful. I was willing to endure the back pain for the great story of a Kanye rant, but time was running out. Then it happened. Kanye’s hand shot up. Obama’s face was frozen in a look of alarm and amusement as he girded himself for whatever came next. “Last question goes to Kanye,” Obama said. Kanye took a breath and started talking. Yeezy did not disappoint. “You and I are a lot alike,” Kanye said to Obama. “We are both from Chicago; when we first came on the scene, we got so much love. Now we got so many haters.” And it went on like that for nearly a half hour. Some highlights: “Everyone has opponents. Coke has Pepsi. Adidas has Nike. I have Drake3 and you have the Republicans. The only way to get things done is to get the best people together. Me and Jay on the mic. Mario Batali on the pasta and we need Elon Musk. I was drinking a fresh-pressed juice in Japan one day, when I realized that everything in Japan is designed perfectly. Japan is the Apple of countries. I was riding a bike in Shanghai when I had this thought.” I was mesmerized. Obama kept a seriously inquisitive look on his face the whole time. Like all of Kanye’s music, it seemed crazy at first, but before long I was nodding along as if it made complete sense. Eventually, Kanye had to take a breath and Obama jumped in. “Kanye, thank you for your thoughts. You make some really good points, especially about the value of meeting with smart people like Elon Musk. Thank you, everyone, for your support of the DNC. My staff is signaling from the back of the room that I’m late for my next event.

I think we’re biologically impacted by language. It can be deeply, deeply nourishing. And I don’t mean that as a metaphor. It can feel like something cellular gets fed. When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It’s nourishing, it’s rejuvenating. This is not the way we typically think about literature, which we tend to talk about as taking place inside the head—even if it’s the emotional part of the head.

We are afraid to face love head-on. We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?