my friends are cynics, and for the most part so am i. my friends and i are largely involved with new media. those that aren't are just suspect of the internet, rightfully because it's new. "look," my none-new media friends and family say, "what is all this crap then?" and since i can't explain it my choices seem to be to get a pompous i'm-more-wired-than-you attitude or get real cynical real fast... because it feels dangerous to shrug and say "i dunno" to that piercing look in from the evaluating world and simply, in defiance of all social norms refuse to lose your sense of wonder. so i lose it and i hide it, and so forth. i justify why i still dance on the tangential after being burned to hell by it as a real lucrative career if i wanted it. but that's not it at all.
i told the truth the other day, by accident to a guy i was sitting next to on a plane. "look" i said, "you know how a baby acts when it first finds it's hands? that us. we're just trying, and trying everything, cause there's still everything left to try. we'll sort it out given time, and some new beautiful things will come out of it. right now, no.. we don't know what we're doing." he smiled. i think he liked the analogy a lot, and i think he liked his kids a lot. i wasn't done. "in the early days of television people used to gather in droves to watch snow. it was just that incredible." and he laughed. "that's where we are now in new media."
the problem is we're not babies.. we're adults playing with our newfound hands under the glaring light of the adult world. it's not a world where we can do things easily for the simple sake of doing them... i watched a special about the international space station and how people were continually looking for some sort of scientific or financial justification for building it. "damnit!" i was hollering at the tv, "what about hope and wonder and the human spirit? isn't that reason enough?" or even better was what danny said later, "we've got to do it because we were born to do it." that's why in the end we're willing to look like idiots stumbling around on the internet instead of getting real careers. we've got to. we were the sort of people born to be stupid and daring and out on the edge of some wilderness, and all the wildernesses are gone except for the ones in our own collective expression of human.. this is what the internet is. and it's not just us, because the rest of the world has signed off. perhaps the best thing about the stock market is that it isn't really about individual greed. or at least, not entirely. it's something far better, clothed in those rags. it's about betting on the future, and to a certain degree it always has been. internet has for the past 3 or 4 years been the philanthropy of the stock market. so have computers, for longer. and you know what? it'll pay off, far more than the money aspect. it'll pay off because pushing the boundaries of wilderness back is part of being human, and as much as we manage to cloth it in more meager motives, that's what we're driven to do right now. that's what we're hiding inside cynicism, and hipness, and greed. because those qualities are easier to show one another than wonder.
i wonder why?
so i'm a cynic. and i deny the tender heart i have for this stuff, because i got tired of lying and saying i really knew what was going on. and i couldn't bring myself to say in a job interview "look, i don't know what's going on, but i've been paying attention and i'm willing to try." when someone asks me why i'm involved with the net and running linux, reading slashdot while no one is looking and so forth, i've never had the courage to say "because i'm a stupid adventurer type." i proudly claimed to be a geek, and then wondered if i belonged in that club at all. i tell people i could make a whole lot of money if i wanted. (i have no confidence that's true though) i click at their ignorance and say it's a geek thing, if they don't know i certainly can't explain. i'm full of shit. i'm not a geek at heart. i'm a trekkie. i'm a sci-fi buff. i'm an explorer. i do it because i have to... space is closed and this is the last continent on earth to cross. and maybe it's better this way, that we take time to look inside before we really leave home.