But he does occasionally jump the tracks. A while ago, he wrote a very interesting piece about copyright morality and age. He recounts his confusion at a disconnect he experienced with his audience in a talk that he’s given many times. In this talk, he uses a fairly straightforward teaching tool, walking his listeners through the shades of grey that inhabit our moral choices, particularly as they apply to the technorati class’ favorite gremlin: file sharing. Not too surprisingly, most adult audiences obediently follow Pogue through the setup, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the deepening levels of depicted depravity. This particular audience of youths, on the other hand, gave him almost no reaction at all through the entire scenario, to his incredulity and dismay.

The surprise, in a way, is that he was surprised.

Isn’t it a truism, after all, that the next generation is always a wayward threat to civilization as we know it? I mean, really. From time immemorial it has been the children who have challenged the status quo, who have created new and brazen forms of operating in the world. That the digital generation approaches life’s intrigues differently from their parents’ should be a comforting sign that all is right in the universe.

What Pogue is describing, however, is something more than all that. In a (slightly) more recent posting, he begins to flesh out some of this digital battleground, again puzzled by his interlocutors who do not understand where he’s coming from. As in most disagreements, he’s not doing much to understand where they’re coming from, and there’s the unfortunate rub. For in addition to your standard generation gap, this particular morality divide is pushed apart by the tectonic forces of economics and technology, forces that will eventually lead who knows where.

The issues of digital copyright and who pays whom how much for what in this increasingly networked world certainly don’t need to be revisited here. Suffice to say it’s all extremely complicated, no one’s right, and 100 years hence it won’t matter at all. These are the shell-games and the totems that we fixate on in avoidance of the real issues. There is a sea change afloat that has nothing to do with the internet or with digital media. We may be looking at a transformational moment, not unlike the invention of a new language, that’s been brewing for about a generation – since the ‘80’s in fact.

When I was growing up, Baby Boomers were in the middle of their triumphal rise. Real wages were at an all-time high, and my generation’s parents knew that they were on top of the world. As they enjoyed their wine coolers and mortgaged their way of life, our entire system was making a profound shift away from a productive economy and into a service economy. Productivity was no longer measured in “things produced” but in more arcane units of “value added”. And with this altered definition of productivity, we’d all taken the first steps away from the tangible, concrete value of goods towards a far more flexible and volatile market. Now that over two thirds of our entire GDP is in services, the potential for our sense of balance to be slewed completely is pretty high.

By itself, the service economy’s influence on our morality may be relatively mild, and it may even be beneficial. After all, so many of the intangibles that make life enjoyable are found in services, like having a good massage or paying someone else to change your car’s oil. And there is something profoundly rewarding about knowing that we are doing something for the benefit of other people. But mix this all up with that second great bugaboo of the ‘80’s, rampant consumerism, and things start getting funny.

What’s wrong with consumerism? it may fairly be asked. By itself, again, probably not much. The desire to purchase more and more and ever more goods (and services) is fairly benign, and in a functioning market, self-regulating – you can’t buy what you can’t afford. For the Boomers, these two aspects of our economy fed into each other quite naturally. There was a golden moment when access to purchasing power was matched by access to productive power, paid for by the power of services. No longer did we need to make widgets in order to buy doo-dads; all we had to do to buy our doo-dad was help someone out in some valuable way. Never mind where the doo-dads came from.

Children of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, however, weren’t taught about the whole chain. More than any previous generation, I and my peers were protected from the evils of the workplace (and the world) as much as possible in the belief that what we didn’t know couldn’t hurt us. What may have started as a benign desire of our parents’ to protect their kids morphed into a full-on cultural phenomenon, where an entire generation came of age without a visceral relationship with the world and the way it works. Even if we knew some of what our folks did for a living, creating something of value was not the message that sank in. The media was working overtime feeding us a steady diet rich in over-sweetened images of wealth and luxury, generously salted with the story that work was meaningless bureaucracy that everyone hated. For the increasingly rare kid who actually ran a lemonade stand, the idea of making that lemonade from lemons was laughably absurd.

Fast-forward a decade, and all of these forces have become magnified. Through the 90’s the one-two punch of “individuality reigns supreme,” and “individuals have no value” did its damage to the psyche of that generation. An endless parade of marketing messages have hammered this bi-polar philosophy directly at the youth, targeting their hearts and minds and their parents’ pocketbooks and wallets. “Buy this!” and you will be making your individual mark on the world, just like everybody else. “Buy bulk!” turns each of you into mini corporations, maximizing your ROI by tapping into the anonymous power of the mass market. American exceptionalism being the prevailing mythos, we celebrated the entrepreneur while Wal-Mart made it clear that the little guy was expendable. The unmistakable fact is that the only way we can afford our free-spirited independence is because everyone else is buying it as well. Once college hit and (theoretically, at least) the parental purse-strings tightened, the deluge of easy credit offers easily perpetuated the cycle.

Enter the internet.

Before the bust, the dot-com boom had everyone a-twitter about the New Economy. Breathlessly, we were told about how everything was different: information is digital, value is what we make of it, and economic gravity has been repealed. It was the apotheosis of everything we had already been taught about money and “real jobs” being played out on and validated by Wall Street. The irony to all this is that the internet would never have existed if the market was all there was.

Consider how the internet came to be. As an interconnection of several networks, it inherited the characteristics of its forebears: principally ARPANET, but there were dozens, large and small. That alphabet soup of networks and protocols was cooked up in (often government-funded) university settings by researchers and scientists who trusted one another, making decisions and sealing deals on the merits of a phone call. They were all mutually invested primarily in facilitating free and easy access to the vast stores of information that their respective institutions housed. Revealingly, one internet developer said, “I saw it as a scientist; I didn’t see it as a human.”

The World Wide Web, built on the backbone of the internet, was even more explicit in its openness. Originally developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN for high energy physicists, the protocols and tools of the web were released into the public domain, partly as a way of encouraging widespread adoption. But there was an unmistakable synergy with the efforts of Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation. After all, they were both working in academic environments, engaged in synchronous efforts to develop the tools and structures needed for enriched academic research. In academia, knowledge, information is the lifeblood, the alternating currency upon which existence depends. And so all these founders very deliberately created an online culture that abhorred any restrictions on this flow.

This is certainly not the whole picture. Cisco Systems did not (could not) develop its routers and offer them for free, nor were the computers that hosted the internet even remotely cheap. But as long as all that fussy expense was handled by massive university budgets, it needn’t taint the pure and noble principles that appealed so strongly to that huge demographic just entering this new age and seeking to make its way. Already unattached to the concept of production, the internet released the tethers that held this generation to the service economy, promising a utopia of communal sharing wherein the global barriers of distance and language were instantaneously collapsed.

For those of us who fixated on our conception of ourselves as “individuals”, the tremendous opportunity to define our selves online was a true opiate. The internet and the web were further perfections of the message we had been taught so thoroughly – that we were mighty and unique individuals who only existed in an anonymously faceless mob.

Importantly, the market of money could never have managed what these visionaries and their generation of followers had achieved in their university sconces. Turning a profit on anything, at least in the conventional, short-term sense has long required maintaining control over whatever is being offered for that profit. But maintaining control and developing a de-centralized network that anyone can improve on are contradictory impulses, especially in a global business and regulatory culture that is based entirely on ownership. Ownership of goods, capital, and critically — ephemerally — rights is the direct currency that powers the world. It wasn’t until the late ‘90’s that transformers began to be invented to connect the world of the internet to the world of commerce, but by then, the cultural lines had been drawn and the trenches had been dug.

The idea of rights, it turns out, is the pivot point around which Pogue’s two audiences spin. For the older audiences, rights are a part of the vast business contract that society maintains with itself, one of the tools we have to ensure that producers are paid for their products. The new generation has learned to think of rights in the academic, philosophical sense that knowledge and people require free intercourse for their value to be realized. Neither of these interpretations is morally wrong, and in fact they are very self-consistent and stable systems for interacting with the world.

The problem is that self-consistency. During the gold rush for the web about a decade ago, the transformers that were built weren’t actual transformers so much as attempts to graft the direct current of business onto the alternating current of the web, without truly understanding the vast gulf of incompatibility between the two. Content, the product of considerable work, was hastily converted for sale on the digital bookshelves, without the realization that those shelves belonged to a vast lending library, not a bookstore. And at the other end, the very idea that content required work that demanded compensation was simply non-existent in the universe of the netizens, those youth who have been assiduously trained not to recognize themselves in the mirror of production and in turn validated by freedom-loving intellectuals buffered by academia.

Ironically, David Pogue himself straddles this line. While I certainly don’t know how the New York Times pays its staff, the fact remains that I did not pay to read his two articles, nor the myriad other essays and videos he produces as an (insulated) employee of a very large, profitable enterprise. Nor are you, gentle reader, paying to read this little essay, composed primarily in an open source browser on an open source blogging platform. It begs the question: where’s the line between a product that must be paid for versus a product that can be freely distributed? For Pogue, that line seems to lie where his relationship with the Times ends. My own example doesn’t even involve the internet, but the principle is, to me, the same (I generally expect to be compensated for singing, which is unfortunately surprising to many people).

Naturally, there are so many different facets to Pogue’s problem. All of them are at different angles to each other, and each can appear to be the most important in the world at any given moment. Much in the way that people themselves have been caught up in the whorl of collective individuation, the overwhelming complexity of any given scenario shows how far we have been blown from such wondrously facile notions as “free trade” and “monetary compensation”.

Morality is really the wrong lens through which to evaluate all of this. While I adamantly believe that there is such a thing as Right and Wrong, I as adamantly believe that neither of them exist in the world, except as frames within which our behavior can be understood. What all this internet kerfuffle does show, however, is that our social contract is indeed being threatened by transformative pressures. This is more than a generational mis-understanding, it’s a re-alignment of the most basic roles we all play in relation to each other. Fortunately, I have no idea where this will lead.

But I do want to find out.

I suppose the wording of my question was a bit too blatantly one-sided to be fair. But for me, it’s an honest perception that there’s a limit to the usefulness of these tools. The problem is not about what these social networking tools provide, but rather in how many social networks there are. Every month, it seems, there’s another niche group served by yet another service. While this seems perfectly obvious and natural, it perpetuates the splintering of society into ever smaller fragments. While we devote a certain amount of time to our networks, strengthening and developing relationships with complete strangers as often as not, if our real-world friends don’t participate or move in different online circles, we risk losing those connections.

Take online chat, for example. There are something like 20 different IM programs and protocols, all with vast user bases that most likely have only some degree of overlap. But where they don’t is a pretty huge disconnect. I imagine most people tend to use only one, maybe two different IMs, so how many of their friends are they not connected to? Maybe it isn’t an issue in the younger generation, but I have to wonder how divided we can really be. At what point do we reach diminishing returns, in time spent hopping around various networks versus the tangible value gained from all that attentiveness?

Certainly, this is something that is different for everyone. And that’s what has gotten me mulling lately. In the article, Clive Thompson discusses the phenomenon of ambient awareness. While focused on the phenomenon of technology-assisted awareness of other people’s doings, it can be seen as a novel description of social living, period. Life in a community requires this kind of awareness of each other. Lack of it is, in fact, one of my major frustrations with some groups.

But I also know that I’m fully culpable, here. My own behavior online gives me a clue that despite my protestations, I’m not very good at either monitoring or maintaining ambient awareness. I check updates rarely, and I almost never provide updates. My own weakness here certainly informs my opinion about the usefulness of the entire phenomenon. And I do know that I’m far from alone in this.

Which is what leads me to think that maybe awareness is another kind of intelligence, or another sliding scale along which people have greatly varying abilities. Situational awareness is an obvious counterpoint, and anyone who drives in Boston can attest to the wide variability in people’s ability to know what’s going on around them. And situational awareness can be trained and developed, but I suspect that some people simply can never reach the level of attentiveness to their environment that a hotshot athlete brings to the game.

Is it the same with ambient awareness? Am I simply not graced with the capacity for life on Twitter and Facebook and you name it else? What does this mean for society at large? Will we have yet another split among those who have online connectability and those who have-not?

(These aren’t rhetorical questions - dive in!)

Naturally, as the phrase “Magical Thinking” gained currency and prominence, my father leaped all over it. This was proof positive that the facts of science and the mode of logic were superior in every way. We didn’t require totems or symbols, and we certainly knew that what we thought about things had absolutely no impact on them in reality.

But our cats perpetually, and viciously, fought each other.

The magic of magical thinking is magic viewed from the outside, from the rational, from the scientific. It is a magic of perceived cause and real effect, wherein the self-proclaimed dispassionate observer declares that no, in fact, your reality is wrong. You may think that there is a connection between your mind and the world, but it just isn’t so. Application of the phrase can vary hugely, from cognitive development to the campaign for the presidency. The reality of what happened is here, but the victim of magical thought believes that the cause is over there. Beyond that, there is, in all contexts, a sense of ease, that thinking makes something so, and thinking isn’t that hard, is it? Deliberately magical thinkers, those that set up websites devoted to the topic, may make an almost-persuasive argument that thinking is in fact hard work that we can all bend ourselves to, but really it’s as easy as choosing the red pill. Our choice will create the reality.

This is the straw man, this magic of spooky action at a distance. For anyone who wishes, this facile definition becomes a powerful totem for all mystery, or for all enemies. After all, it’s plainly obvious that our mind doesn’t affect matter. Not even when, so very long ago, we bent our will to planting the first seed and nurturing it ourselves to fruition and eating something that would not have existed if our mind hadn’t conceived of it. For this is magic. Life is magic, and without magic we would not exist, for we are all products of human will.

Why, after all, did our cats have such tempers?

But leaving that all aside for the moment, what comes to mind when we think of magic? Harry Potter, perhaps? Frodo? Luke Skywalker? Witches and goblins and wands and spells and potions and fairies and power. Our mythology and our fantasy are filled with magic, be it the scrubbed and sanitized “Force” of the Star Wars universe or the straight-out-of-the-playbook wands-and-spells of Potter. There is an incredibly rich history of the occult, with taxonomies and stories dating back into pre-literate times. Many of these became inextricably woven into the fabric of our culture, with characters like Lilith living so close to the surface of one of the world’s major religions that you can feel her breath. All of the major myths that drive storytelling to this day have an element of magic, be it David and Goliath or Oedipus or Orpheus or Odysseus or King Arthur and Guinevere. There is something so powerful and important to us about magic that we keep returning to it, time and again, satisfied that there is where truth about our world lies.

If we paid attention to the cats, what might we have learned about ourselves?

For in all of these worlds, in all of this knowledge of magic we share with each other in song and tale, we know that magic is about so much more than mental cause and physical effect. Whether a self-proclaimed dispassionate observer can declare our beliefs about what just happened there is not even relevant. For we know that magic, in these stories, in our lives, is tremendously difficult, requiring immense force of will and totality of being. Because we know that if we don’t commit ourselves completely, then we will lose it all, for magic is not benign. It is not about spooky action at a distance; it is about what stands against us. Lord Voldemort. Sauron. The Emperor. Magic is about Right and Wrong. It is about Good against Evil.

Nowhere else in human experience do we have such clarity. What’s bad is Bad and what’s good is Good, and we always have that choice available to us. We can choose which reality we will live.

To the obsessively rational, all this is casually dismissed. It is, after all, fiction, just as it is ludicrous to think that our will has any impact on the world around us. The fact that our cats battled had no connection to the irrational anger that suffused our household, no connection to the resentments we silently directed at each other, no connection to the shattering breakup of our family. What the cats knew was that the logic of it all had fallen apart, and that there was no magic we knew or could acknowledge that could make things whole.

We could only think of magic rationally, sensibly, as is common practice in this post-industrial, post-modern, post-post world. And while the analysis of magical thinking that is in vogue today focuses on cause and effect, the emphasis on magical thinking that is likewise in vogue today focuses us on something far more dangerous. When we casually paint someone with the broad brush of “magical thinking,” we intend a cheap insult to the relative intelligence and reason of our target. But we have ourselves become so hideously ensnared by thinking magically that we cannot see the world any other way. This is the pure, unadulterated, black and white nature of magic itself transmuted into our guiding philosophy for this world, creating in our minds an unshakable belief in Right and Wrong and Good and Evil.

And this is a road fraught with peril. In the magical myths, We are Good. We are Right, and the Other is Wrong. But we have become a culture that believes this to be true of ourselves, where our enemies are not only opposing us politically or militarily, they … are … Evil. The corollary of this is to believe that we will most certainly win whatever we set out to win, because when, after all, does the guy in the white hat ever lose in the stories? But believing that we will win and that we are right is a far more dangerous offense than it may seem. For if magical thinking tells us that we created our reality, thinking magically prevents us from ever seeing that reality in the first place.

I don’t believe there is any pathway to being a human being that doesn’t involve a fair bit of struggle between magical thinking and thinking magically. After all, magical thinking is a developmental stage that we all pass through, and it seems an important one, at that. Thinking magically can also be thought of as a developmental stage, but increasingly, it’s one that we stagnate in, rather than pass through. Instead of recognizing that magic is a fascinating, joyous, mysterious subject, we cling to the shallow veneer of what it represents and allow that to color our perspective of so much of the world. Our ability to engage in this dialectic, to think rationally about mysteries without destroying the mystery is precisely that which defines our humanity. As soon as we lose either the logic or the magic, we’ve lost something profound.

Many people, okay, most people I talk to about the fact that I commute using public transit say one of two things: “Oh, I could never do that, I hate the subway,” and, “Good for you,” as if I’m volunteering at a meth clinic. Which is ironic, because when I explain that I am singularly not fond of driving to commute, I’m usually met with unanimous consent on the point. But it seems that the misery of driving outweighs the perceived misery of the T.

Which mystifies me. But that’s another topic, really.

The subway is a curious purgatory, a place that exists in an eternal between. As a public system, it lacks a lot of the nuanced hierarchy of the highway, where beater cars yield to, or sometimes boldly challenge, the aggressively new WASP-mobiles of the debt-ridden, self-proclaimed elite. Once aboard a trolley or train, there is no use for either the hasty, impatient sidewalk stalk to which I am prone or the oblivious dawdle that always congests the Harvard Square byways. Instead, there are minutes at a time devoted to a void, a blank—waiting from one goal to another goal. In such goal-oriented times, this is a precious pause.

While arrested so, people change. More so than with air travel, which has its own rituals and regulations that stymie the process, the routine of the daily mass-transit commute has a distilling, purifying effect. Perhaps it’s the anomie that many people feel for the ordeal, perhaps it’s the early morning and after-work fog that settles, but people are somehow condensed into themselves on the T, and something remarkable shines through.

The mark of a truly great portrait photographer is the ability to capture the unique essence of a person, to find at least one aspect of who they truly are. With a camera, as in life, piercing the veils we live behind is an awesome responsibility. It’s small wonder that people have believed that the camera will steal their soul, since even among the cognoscenti, those rare, intimate portraits are both treasured and viewed with a slight bit of discomfort, as if we had entered a sacred space without an invitation. That invitation is trust, and it opens us all up to a level of humanity we typically daren’t recognize.

It is ironic, then, that while enduring a loud, often awkwardly cramped purgatory, that same humanity glimmers. As I look around at everyone else, it’s plain to see that they are, at that moment, just who they are. For those brief, timeless breaths, everyone around me has dropped their guard for whatever reason, and we are all invited in.

The opportunity to recognize something magical in a complete stranger has probably never carried much cultural weight. The rules of society are governed by our masks, by how we present ourselves and how we respond to the masks of our peers. That beater car on the highway is a rust-and-rubber mask for the driver, and the impatient march down the cobbled walks of “our fair city” another. We live by these veils, and too often we love by them as well. But when the masks dissolve, we realize what it is to love, and what it is to live.

To be fair, I don’t love the subway, any more than the next cubical drone. I do love the gift of passing through purgatory twice a day, watching the still at work, and emerging a touch closer to paradise.

Cool.

Since seven is such an interesting number, I thought it’d be fun to try to map the seven people I met to, say, the seven chakras. Hm… for the protection of the innocent, I won’t go into the details, but a fairly reasonable map emerges. A couple people can safely represent a couple different chakras, which helps.

How about the Seven Valleys? Again, not a bad lineup! Or how about the Seven Signs of Celtic Wisdom? Manageable. The Rosicrucian lineup becomes a bit more difficult, and I won’t even try with the Seven Deadly Sins.

When I’m feeling particularly enlightened-esque, I can get quite involved in thinking of how all these apparently random events just plain aren’t. What’s surprising to me about today is that I haven’t been in a mystical mode at all for a long time. I doubt this odd synchronicity will jump start anything major, but it does prompt me to say, “Huh.”

There seems to be a darkness in each of us, a shadow at our cores. A dangerous mix of desires and deceptions that has no source other than our common heritage of humanity continually haunts us, goads us. Occasionally, it consumes us entirely, and we find ourselves possessed by some demon, unable to divine our way out of the trap. At this extreme, exorcism and phychopharmacology play equal partner in dispelling the spirits. For we know that our co-equal inheritance, the Light, has been forced into abeyance at these moments, and we struggle almost desperately to regain it. This struggle is in fact the great theme and meme of our world, pervading our science, our religion, our public policy, and our private dreams.

As much as we are drawn towards the Light, I think we are more effectively motivated by fear of the dark. The rallying cry of politicians is unerringly that we must stop the bad, not that we must strive to create good. We have a word for nightmares, but no convenient way to describe those occasional dreams of bliss. Visions perhaps, but those are reflexively relegated to madness, dismissed as phantoms of a different kind of darkness. Cosmology and psychology both operate in the darkness, describing in excruciating detail all the ways in which the twin universes – the stars and ourselves – arose from darkness, exist in chaos, and will inevitably return to darkness. Only religion offers a different tale.

But I don’t think we’ve heard it properly.

The one constant in all religious teaching is simply that the Light Is. However it’s named, whatever its meaning to humanity, religion alone holds aloft the banner of that Beacon, and enjoins us to follow It. In fact, it is only by identifying that glorious Light that we can even know what darkness is.

And yet, desire, danger, and depression are all at the core of our religious thought today. We hear the same story we tell everywhere else, that the darkness is us, that human nature lies in the cracks of the universe, buried in the back of Plato’s cave. Many traditions are quite explicit about this reading, going to great lengths to emphasize the “sinfulness” of Man, a practice that makes followers of these traditions hateful and angry. Many more traditions are more subtle, promising various forms of union with the Light, illuminating their manuscripts with eloquent images and laying out an enticing repast for the soul. If never stated directly, however, our moral poverty is implied by the proffered wealth. The conviction that humanity’s fundamental nature resides in darkness is essential to all these offers of Light.

The arc of this understanding is such a part of us, that we tell it to ourselves. We have become convinced of our own degradation. We hold on to this as a badge of identity, a badge of our humanity. (Human nature is always invoked to explain our animal behavior.) For the majority, there’s nothing exceptional about this. We accept that we are in the back of the cave, casually affirming that those demons are a part of life, allowing the darkness its run, neglecting the erosion it creates. For some of us, the pain of the darkness goads us to seek the Light, and those religions that appeal to our various sensibilities welcome us into their fold.

Faith, of course, isn’t so simple.

The story of our Original Sin, however it’s told, is so profound, and so pervasive, that even within the bosom of the cultural repository of the Light, we are gripped by the darkness. We constantly remind ourselves of our past misjudgments, our animal passions, our selfishness and our ignorance, applying the prod to our own flanks so that we may flee further from them all. These reminders live in pleas for forgiveness, in acts of penitence, in confessions public and private. We wrap ourselves into a co-dependent relationship with our own faith: we must believe because we feel bad, and we feel bad so we must believe.

But that’s not very satisfying. That unhealthy relationship with ourselves leaves a sour aftertaste, and it exudes a musk that other people can smell for miles. I’d rather propose an alternative, a reading that our culture is loathe to approach. What if we actually are creatures of light? What if the darkness truly didn’t exist? What would faith look like if we all knew that we were created noble, and didn’t simply believe it?

Even asking those questions lifts my spirit. It would, of course, be presumptuous of me to even attempt to answer them, but I don’t believe I have to. Throughout the world, the stories of Paradise, of the Abha Kingdom, of Elysium, and so on, all share alike an image of people who know that they are illuminated beings. For how maligned and mistreated these stories are, for how often they are used as bludgeons against the so-called unfaithful, they remain the purest source of our understanding of true faith. They are the keys for the mystics.

The real mystery is that they are all descriptions of this world, of life, of people, of what we truly are. If only we could stop believing and start knowing.