James-Strocel.com

Hello, everyone. To anybody who doesn’t know, my name is James Strocel. I’m speaking to you from the great COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. It’s April 1st. I’m in my basement, and in the madness of isolation, and the desperation of impending doom, I’ve done the most selfish, unforgivable act. I’ve created a podcast. Vlog. Essay type thing. You are hearing my voice right now. And that’s unfair.

I didn’t want to do this while history was raging around me. I wanted it be my own personal midlife crisis thing, where I figure out how to use a microphone, to talk to the camera, and how to do that thing youtubers do when they smash cut where there’s supposed to be a joke. It started off with a new years resolution after I made a blog post that got over 20 likes from my friends and family. Thank you, everyone, for encouraging my most pretentious impulses. It was then and there I decided tha like some people who bring out guitars at parties, I’m the guy who gets a pen and paper. I program websites for my day job, I love writing, people say they like my writing, but writing doesn’t pay enough to cover my mortgage. But I still love doing it, I love creating things. It’s just an impulse i have.

Even, I can’t escape the feeling of how fundamentally unfair it is that I’m doing this. People are dying, people have lost their jobs, and will lose their homes, and here I am in my house, surrounded by my family, with a job that I can do from home. The internet’s working, the utilities are on. My extended older family members are staying put for the most part. I live in a country with a single payer health care system. My car works. I have all the consoles. Because this happened while I was having a staycation, I got to prepare for the coming shelter in place guidelines.

Really, with all the safety and security in my life, right now. What right do I have to take up people’s time like this? There are many marginalized people out there who are being aggressively not listened to. There’s racism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, and just outright theft of people’s lives going on. You should be listening to Shelley Moore, or Naomi Klein, or Ijeoma Oluo, or Casey Explosion, people who have a direct connection to injustice, and have a platform to do something about it. What is the point of listening to yet another white guy, playing with his electronics, drunk on the fantasy, that anybody, anywhere, cares what he thinks?

Then again, maybe you’re just here to talk to me. Me specifically. You clicked the link, opened the file, or read the transcript because we know each other, maybe we’re acquaintances, maybe you’ve known me all my life. Maybe like me, you’re just kind of in a holding pattern and you want to do something more with your thoughts and feelings than bake sourdough bread. See, I love writing, writing stuff like this video. I am sharing it because I want to know if it’s any good. If it’s not, I learn and get better. I hope I can do one of these videos a week. I’ll talk about books I’ve read, things I see, things I’m doing. I don’t know if this has any value, but the value of everything now is such an open question. This is how I’m going to wrestle with it. With all of you. See you next time.

The year isn’t two days old and already we are dealing with climate change fires in Australia, half the city of Hong Kong is still protesting after 8 months, and the US is still practicing diplomacy via remote controlled contract killings. The world’s democracies are electing strong men once again to somehow control a changing world. In times like these, there’s only one thing I can do: Look for the future.

I’ve looked to the future my whole life for answers. They were right there in that Usborne book of the future I took out of the elementary school library. I learned that yes, some day Star Wars could be real. For a while, this last decade, I thought I was living in it for a while. We got computers that fit in our pockets, we had access to all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and we communicated through social networks where everyone, no matter how small or marginalized your identity may be, had a voice. Computer power accelerated exponentially according to Moore’s Law. I just assumed that humanity would get better along with the technology. It didn’t.

It turns out all those wonderful computers, materials, and software were bankrolled by old money trying to “create value”, as it were. The goods and services that we take for granted are being optimized beyond the point of uselessness. Our search results are choked with ads. Our social media feeds are filled with racism and mysogyny because it “drives engagement”. The gig economy that was supposed to liberate workers from the drudgery of 9-5 office jobs instead places them in servitude to giant tech monopolies. The blockchain, the technology that was supposed to automate ownership, is inefficient and deadly to the environment. Bitcoin alone emits 22 million tonnes of carbon every year. In every sector of the economy, the profit motive has ceased to make our world better. The pundits tell us to just not buy from Wal-mart, Amazon, McDonalds, or any other company that’s having a PR team off-day, but what’s the point of voting with your dollars if your wages are being depressed?

To illustrate how much corporations have ruined the web, take this essay posting on my obsolete website from 2005. I’ll have to copy and paste it as a facebook post and twitter thread, because those companies hate it when users follow links off their website. I’ll get buried by the algorithm in favor of some minion meme. So technology, in and of itself, is not the future. Neither are the corporations, or the business of billionaire-making.

Anyway, if that’s not the future, what is? I think we got a few glimpses of it in this last decade. The internet was at its best when it put you in contact with people outside your social circle. I’ve got whole extended found family in Seattle thanks to cheap and easy instant messaging. Anything that stretches the boundaries of your social skills is going to be crucial. It’ll take breaking some rules. Look at that facebook friends list for example. What if you sent any of those friends a message? Or hit that video call button by mistake? Think of how that would change your day. We’ve been duped into thinking that maintaining all these acquaintances is friendship, but there is no real maintaining going on. Only 10% of those contacts post regularly anyway.

The way we relate to ourselves and each other is going to change a lot in this decade. New conflicts are going to erupt. Others are going to be resolved. This is not some half-hearted call for a return to civility. The concept of respect itself is going to be redefined. We cannot simply defer to some abstract idea of objectivity. In the past this was the person in the room who talked the whitest and malest. Marginalized voices will be crucial to this change. Facts may not care about your feelings, but feelings are also facts. There will perspective taking, but also boundaries drawn. I know I’m speaking in vague soothsaying generalities, but we are dealing in the ugly, exciting, and unpredictable world of human contact. Where we are going, we don’t need roads.

And what does that mean for me? 40-year-old James Strocel with his job, family, and mortgage to pay down? At the beginning of the decade, I was having lunch with more people. I’d like to do that again. I want to stop being so precious about my writing. Get out there, say stupid stuff, and pay the price in my twitter mentions. I understand the economics of those platforms, and what they are doing to society, but right now, it’s where the people are. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to talk to more people regularly via text message or signal, my paranoid secure instant messenger of choice. Lots of times I send out texts and get no response other than existential dread in return. I think it means I need to send more memes. It’s going to be a lot of cancelled plans and awkward silences, but I think this is the direction I want to grow. It’s a direction that fills me with that nervous excitement that I felt before, so long ago. It is the future.