Hello scoundrels. Before I get to my commencement address, I’d like to let you know that I’m drumming at the Toronto Folk Festival (August 21–23) on Toronto Island with The Lifers! This will be the sweetest festival and I can’t wait to spend the weekend (with you?!) on that magical island. Tickets are here!
I spend some time last year producing a song with my friend Summer Kodama AKA Empty Melon! It was a classic long-distance collab (CldC), Summer in Las Vegas and me in the Nova Scotia forest. It was an honour to produce the first song for this project, and play some vibes/voice/guitars/misc. It was a special joy to have Jill Sauerteig on cello and JoJo mixing the thing, too! You can check out the song here.
Anyhow, I’ve been thinking a lot about technology and death. Relatable? Let me explain…
My 2018 MacBook Pro did not expect to be doused in water. Clumsily as I’ve treated this laptop—flying upstairs with it tucked under my arm, chopping onions directly beside it on the counter, plonking it onto the floor shortly before collapsing asleep—I never expected it to die so suddenly. But a few weeks ago, at the café, I jumped up to give a friend a hug and my sleepy arm clipped a full glass of water, spilling it directly onto the computer’s keyboard.
I laughed this off, waved my arms dismissively, relieved that the laptop didn’t immediately short-circuit. It would be fine. I turned it off, carried on with my day, leaving it wide open, upside down, over a towel (as many YouTube videos recommended). I went to bed.
The next day, I was in disbelief that it wouldn’t turn on. I frantically insisted it would turn on again, mashing the keys, blowing it with the hair drier, and puffing compressed air into its ports. I tried to remove its pentalobe screws with a guitar pick. Finally, I drove it to a friendly, phlegmy Mac specialist an hour away, in Berwick, who diagnosed the MacBook as completely unresponsive, a total lost cause. Yet I still tried the power button every couple hours over the next week, believing that just the right flow of psychic energy could manifest that sweet, sweet “bwonggggg” start-up sound, that triumphant white apple.
Between personal computers, I entered “a drama not of heaviness but of lightness,” to quote Milan Kundera. I was untethered. My anchor for the past 8 years had dissolved. That MacBook had been an “anchor” in both senses: an immobilizing object (gluing me to a single space while using it) as well as an object of stability and security. Without it, life took on an (initially) uncomfortably lightness. The laptop was the site of accomplishing nearly all work tasks; now I was forced to either postpone or (apologetically) dismiss the week’s work.
In the interim, I, of course, contemplated mortality. Can the “death” of electronics prepare us for our own?
Most “objects” in our lives, from baskets to books, cannot “die” in the sense that our electronics can. We choose the point at which each of our household objects—say, a scratched-up pan—is no longer usable. Then we transition the pan from being, in Heidegger’s terminology, zuhanden (“ready-to-hand,” objects we are using) to being vorhanden (“present-at-hand,” objects we are considering outside of their usefulness, as things-in-themselves). This is particularly interesting when an object exists between its functionality and its clear designation as refuse. Anita and I were getting rid of some pans a few months back, and they lived as temporary installations—in the corner of the hallway, in my office (near the drum set, after testing them out as percussion), and finally, by the front door—before proceeding to the curb, wrapped in plastic, Laura Palmer-esque.
We don’t dispose of our computers this way. Compared to kitchen pans, our computers are alive. We either re-home our old computers or wait for them to die, usually failing to acknowledge this inevitability. We’ve all got friends with glitchy, crusty laptops, with busted speakers and cracked screens, who aren’t holding onto that device because they need to, but because it’s still working, and they don’t need to get a new device until theirs is non-responsive. When they finally go, these computers live in eternal purgatory as vorhanden in our drawers, awaiting divine intervention to whisk them away to a suitable ever-after—but unlike composted apples, MacBooks cannot feed future life.
Humans in our WASP-y culture tend to view our own deaths like that of MacBooks rather than that of apples. Sure, we say “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” but we really believe in eternal heaven or fear eternal hell, or we linger in limbo or limp around Samsara or face an endless void. Just as we slide defunct iPhones into drawers, we lower our kin into coffins. But iPhones become useless; human are, arguably, more useful after death, though we’re uneasy to witness the ways in which our flesh feeds the ecosystem from whence we came. So, we divide the soul from the body. We imagine a clean voyage for the soul, divorced from the dirty journey of the body.
Although “planned obsolescence” is corporate charlatanism, there’s something reassuring about the term itself. Ahhhh, we’re deciding when the obsolescence will occur—that is soooo reassuring. No guesswork. You get 10 years, and that’s it. Obviously, in practice, this “planning” doesn’t mean your computer will die on March 3, 2031, but it the term acknowledges the fact that this device will, at some point, pass into the realm of the vorhanden.
On the other hand, there’s the aspiration that all technology should be comprised of interchangeable parts. Like the ship of Theseus, we could, in theory, swap out parts of our devices indefinitely, so that the device endures even as its individual components die off.
The human equivalent to this aspirational process is organ transplantation. In recent history (the first human organ transplantation took place in 1954) we’ve miraculously found ways to prolong a human being’s existence by swapping out components. These procedures are a feat of human ingenuity, and I’ve certainly found comfort in thinking of giving “my knees to the needy,” as John Prine sings it, when I die. But I can’t resist pulling at the nagging thread that, by picking apart our human bodies to continue the functioning of other human bodies, we’re resisting the cycle of “dust to dust,” re-using our parts to fuel longer and longer human lives without returning our flesh, in full, to feed the forest (an 80kg human body will release 2.56kg of nitrogen into the soil as it decomposes). Green burials, on the other hand, avoid the use of formaldehyde, don’t involve the carbon dioxide release of cremation (allowing for carbon sequestering instead), and—of course—mean that you don’t need to buy a $1400 18-gauge steel casket (although it is tempting, as Costco Members Receive an Exclusive Value on Caskets and Urns with Titan Casket through Costco Next.). Maybe that would feel a bit like being inside a MacBook, but with some velvet cushioning.
The tension modern technology presents us—disposability vs. inter-changeability—plays out, unconsciously, through the people championing this very technology. The CEOs promoting technology that flaunts a disdain for maintenance, repair, and/or remediation (the steps needed to prolong life in any case, from your kitchen pans to the lawns of a graveyard) advocate and strive for their own immortality. For instance, Larry Ellison, the CEO of “Integrated Cloud Applications and Platform Services” company Oracle (who make no mystery of their soulless ambitions, as their aesthetic nightmare of a website attests) apparently once told his biographer: “Death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?”
While this statement carries the innocence of a little boy looking into a coffin and asking, “but where’s grandpa?”, it reveals a timeless fear of aging that has never been confronted with such technological might. The question of quality of life vs. duration of life is one of our basic human quandaries, spawning fountain of youth myths across time, fuelling debates around abortion, and, most profoundly, resulting in our inability to let go of our possessions, our bodies, and our desires, as we age.
Anita and I recently rewatched Midsommar, and I was actually touched by the scene where a pair of septuagenarians voluntarily throw themselves off a cliff, committing suicide by choice in the eyes of the entire community. While their gruesome death is what stuck with me the first viewing (it’s an Ari Aster film: horror built around affecting, discreet showpieces), what struck me this time around is the grace with which these community members are choosing to end their lives while it’s still a conscious choice, and the importance of the community witnessing the moment of death.
Though Midsommar obviously ramps this up to a horrific degree, this bold acknowledgement of death in the eyes of community makes me think of Robert Munsch’s recently publicized decision to die by MAID, and the bravery and thoughtfulness this decision entails. This topic is explored in Louis Theroux’s excellent “Choosing Death” BBC documentary, while my favourite show of last year, FX’s “Dying for Sex,” overtly showcases how a dying person and their loved ones can acknowledge the progress of death in the final weeks of life. In one scene, as a woman sits in a hospital bed suffering from terminal cancer, her mom and best friend nearby, a hospice nurse explains:
“Death is not a mystery. It is not a medical disaster. It is a bodily process, like giving birth, or like going to the bathroom, or coughing, or having an orgasm. Your body knows what to do. Your body knows how to die. How cool is that?!”
As all these thoughts around death and technology were percolating, I happened to uncover my ancient Tumblr blog (circa 2013) and was amazed to find a post commemorating the death of my first cell phone. The second half of the post feels so relevant to this discussion, I must quote it in full:
Perhaps that is the most important feature of this phone is the fact that it has all this sentimental meaning and association and content (though the MP3 player is a close second). I’d also like to think that such an ‘ancient’ phone gently encourages me to let go of these memories, as it has so little memory itself. There are pictures, sounds, and messages that I have had to delete forever; but I can live with that, as they are constantly replaced by new ones. With new smart phones, it seems that memory is so abundant that one becomes easily attached to a massive bog of sentimentally valuable content. Messages are all saved; pictures, videos, text are allowed to linger on the phone until it dies what often seems to be a sudden and premature death. Smartphones are magnificent inventions, and very handy tools, but I feel that they may subtly corrupt one’s lifestyle in a way that older, similar technology is much less able.
This Telus Env2 phone may never completely stop working—it has been dropped, stepped on, left out in the rain, left out in the sun…it can still keep a charge for multiple days at a time. But if it ever does pass away, it won’t be too hard to let it go. It’s been teaching me how to let go all along. If you’re ever feeling down, just remember that obsolete cell phones can teach you about coping with inevitable mortality.
My younger self would not necessarily be proud of how much weight my current phone, laptop, and external heard drives hold, with terabytes of data between them. As I listen to Laura Marling sing, “we all want to be held down,” I think of how this new computer, on which I’m now typing, keeps me static; furnishes me with digitally weighty documents, videos, mementos; and keeps me dependent, Sisyphean, with so many digital tchotchkes strapped to my back. But this MacBook also facilitates writing, researching, bridging thoughts together; it promises to momentarily liberate me through the sumptuous, metaphysical flight of the internet, promising me limitless insights that await, just slightly out of reach, if I could only connect the fabricated constellations of this sky.
Milan Kundera responds,
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
Political Tidbit
For Nova Scotian readers: there’s an online gathering for NDP supporters on July 22nd (Wednesday) at 7pm! If you’re also fed up with our provincial government squandering money on short-sighted projects while abandoning arts, culture, and heritage projects, I’d love to see you at this meeting!
What I’m in love with lately:
ALBUM: Aldous Harding’s Train on the Island is my fave of the year so far, nobody does it like AH!
VIDEO: Recently became aware of The Mousehole Cat, the most charming animated adaptation of a beloved UK children’s book.
OBJECT: For the first time in my life, I have acquired a desk that is non-IKEA. It’s a heavy wooden “banker’s desk” with so many drawers and I love it.
BOOK: Motherhood by Sheila Heti, nobody does it like SH!
PERSON: you!